The Boy Who Found Fear At Last
by atippleofyourtears
Summary: A maze of nightmares, a locket that won't open, and mysterious visions of a boy who glows like starlight - Jack is forced to contend with all of these things after a search for what happened to his mother and sister goes horribly awry. The key to Jack's salvation may lie in the past of one Kozmotis Pitchiner, a past that Jack is forced to learn about whether he likes it or not.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:** For newcomers to the "Guardian of Screwing Up" series, it's best read the following way:

1. Snowbird  
2. The Frost Spirit and the Honey Tree  
3. The King of Cold Mountain  
4. The Boy Who Found Fear At Last

There might be a oneshot we toss in taking place between TKoCM and TBWFFAL, but it's not written yet and is just a bit of funny fluff. For those that want to skip previous stories, all you really need to know is that Anansi the Spider has joined the Guardians after a long time of working for Manny behind the scenes, Jack and Bunny have cemented their friendship, Jack and Tooth possibly have flirty feelings for each other, and Jack has definitely developed as a Guardian to be a bit more level-headed, responsible, and wise.

**Trigger Warnings:** While there will be some dark moments in later fics, this fic is undoubtedly the darkest in the series. It will contain quite a few dark themes, involving physical/psychological abuse and Stockholm's syndrome, isolation/loneliness, mental illness, and psychological mind-borkery. It's definitely not for the faint of heart, so if you find those things to be triggering, it may not be the story for you. However, we're big fans of showing how people overcome horrible things, so it won't be all darkness, all the time. This isn't a character torture fic, it's a fic about someone fighting their way free from the dark.

Basically, this is our version of the Dark!Jack concept and we plan to make it a bit different than some might expect. For those that don't think they'll have problems with it, we hope you enjoy the ride.

* * *

**The Boy Who Found Fear At Last**

by Kira, Kate, and Kaylin

* * *

**Chapter 1**

"Is it scary?"

"It's not scary."

"It looks scary."

"It's not scary."

"I'm not watching it if it's scary."

Jamie, eleven-years-old and as normal a child as any - aside from his choice in best friends - aimed his most deadpan stare at the centuries-old eternally teenage frost spirit who regularly charged into battle against the stuff of literal nightmares, but was presently balking at the prospect of watching a movie with the word "skeleton" in the title.

"It's not scary," Jamie insisted. "It's really, really hokey, I promise. It doesn't look realistic at all."

Jack pressed his lips together, hmm-ing in deep thought. "Okay," he relented. "Only if it's fake-scary rather than real scary."

"How is it you can face down the King of Nightmares and scary gribblies in the dark but you can't stomach a scary movie?"

"Pitch is nowhere near as scary as some of these movies. I tried to watch that clay-ey one, Coraline?" Jack shook his head, eyes wide with terror. "Too scary."

"That's not even really a horror movie. I mean, it is a horror movie, but it's stop-motion animated, it's not meant to be really scary like The Exorcist."

"She wanted to replace her eyes with buttons. _Buttons_, Jamie."

"Okay, well, this one isn't really scary. It's funny. It's making fun of old sci fi and rubber monster horror movies."

Jack looked at the promo image on the screen of the laptop. "It says there's a skeleton in it."

"It's a really stupid-looking prop skeleton."

"It's got the word cadaver in the title."

"_Cadavra_. It's a made up name."

"This movie doesn't have color."

"Now you're just messing with me. There's no way you have problems with black and white movies when you've been around longer than movies have even _existed_."

Jack's resulting grin made Jamie bean him in the face with a pillow before returning to his laptop to start the movie.

"So it..." Jack scratched his head, looking at the apparatus. "You play it on your computer and it plays it on the TV the same time?"

"Mm hmm. Through that cord there. HDMI."

Jack whistled low as Jamie finished setting the movie up. "I remember back when I thought internal combustion engines were as good as it was gonna get. Now it's all computers and cellphones and the talkies are mostly in color."

Jamie scooted back from hanging half off the bed to lie on it fully. "Move over, gramps, so we can start watching our talky."

Jamie had gotten taller in the last few years, so they had to sprawl across his bed diagonally to both had room to stretch their legs. Getting taller came with things like being eleven.

"Jamie, who are you talking to?" Mrs. Bennett called from downstairs.

"Jack Frost, Mom," Jamie called back, eyes fixed on the screen as the movie began. Jack thought he heard a slight sigh through the floorboards. The mortal boy and the frost spirit looked at each other, snickered, and returned their attention to the movie.

"That's a lot of skulls."

"Yep."

"That is a whole lot of skulls."

"Uh huh."

"Each of those skulls had a tongue in it. And could sing once."

"What kind of songs do you hear rubber tongues singing? Because those skulls are rubber."

Something buzzed. Jack looked up, confused, but Jamie just reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. The movie played on as he flipped the phone's keyboard open, tapped in a quick response, then flipped it shut and slipped it back into his pocket.

Jack hadn't had a moment to concentrate on the movie before Jamie's phone buzzed again. In an instant it was out, Jamie tapping away on it. Jack leaned over his shoulder to get a look at the phone, and Jamie looked at him with a slight frown.

"Do you mind?"

"Nope."

"Then maybe you could stop trying to read my messages?"

"Why, what's so private about 'hey' from Cupcake?"

"Argh!" Jamie hunched around his phone, hiding it from Jack's view. Jack just laughed and played at trying to sneak another peek at the phone.

"Come on, what's to be embarrassed about? It's just Cupcake. It's not like she's asking you out to the Sadie Hawkins or anything."

The expression on Jamie's face right then, his lips puckered together and his expression awkward, was more telling than words could be.

"Or is she asking you out to the Sadie Hawkins?"

Jamie shook his head.

"Or maybe you're _hoping_ she'll ask you out to the Sadie Hawkins."

"Look, I don't even know what a Sadie Hawkins is, but I'm guessing you're talking about a dance."

"It's a dance where the girls ask the boys."

"That's...just a dance. Nobody cares who asks who anymore." Jamie rolled his eyes at Jack's antiquated view of courtship. "And yes, there's a dance coming up and yes, I'm maybe, possibly hoping Cupcake asks me."

"So why don't you just ask her?"

"I don't know," Jamie said ruefully. "I mean, she's just...so cool. We hang out, but like...she's a grade above me and she totally kills the ropes in gym class. And one time, I saw her knock a kid out with one punch when he was beating up another kid." Jamie's eyes were wide and impressed. "She made him eat dirt. He was so embarrassed he got beat up by a girl he didn't even tell on her. She got there before even I could try to help."

"Yes, she's a very cool girl," Jack agreed, grinning his amusement. "And?"

"What if she doesn't think I'm cool enough?"

"Oh yeah, because standing up to the Bogeyman multiple times isn't cool at all," Jack deadpanned.

"But she only saw the once and we were both little kids then."

"Little kids!" Jack laughed. "So what are you now?"

"Uh, preteens? Duh?"

Jack started to laugh - but the laugh fell quiet as he realized Jamie was right.

Jamie rolled his eyes. "We can't all be 300 years old, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be a kid forever."

He was flippant, but the observation cut deep into Jack's brain. Just three years ago, Jamie had been eight. In less time than that, he'd be thirteen.

Jamie's childhood was slipping away.

"Don't you have anything better to do than spy on my messages anyway?" Jamie asked, only mildly cagey, pushing Jack with a brotherly nudge. "Seriously, there's _no_ Guardian business more pressing now than watching bad movies and reading my texts?"

Jack pulled himself back to the moment. "Actually, North, Bunny, Sandy, and Anansi are fighting something right now. It feeds on the life force of children, though, so they thought it was safe if I sat this one out, just in case. Tooth, too. She started doing what she does when she was a teenager, so we're both out for the count." Jack shrugged. "But her work is a lot more...worky than mine." He grinned, ruffling Jamie's hair. "A Guardian of Fun's work is much less taxing. And sometimes it's fun to tease your friends about their extremely obvious crushes. So are you gonna ask her out, or would you rather go another round against the Boogeyman first?"

Jamie blushed fiercely. "Jeeze! Let's just watch the movie, okay?"

Jack tried to watch and even made himself laugh at the parts that seemed appropriate but his mind was elsewhere.

Jamie was growing up. Right now, he was like a little brother to Jack, but it couldn't stay that way forever. He couldn't still be a little brother when he was a father or a grandfather, could he? As far as family went, he still had the memories of his little sister and for a while they'd had a chance to grow up together, but now she was gone, and he never got to see what she'd grown up into.

It was a question that had niggled at him for quite some time now, the question of what had happened to his sister after he died, but he'd always had things - and people - to distract him from the past by making him focus on the present.

But Jamie was growing up and that meant someday he'd be gone, too.

The thought of that made him focus on what was already gone.

Which was why, when the movie was over, Jack Frost could be found in the Burgess Public Library, attempting to use a microfiche.

It was difficult. For one, he didn't really know what he was even looking for and two, he'd had enough trouble figuring out how to turn it on let alone work the little knobs, and thirdly, it was very easy to overshoot and fly past what he was trying to read.

It was a fairly useless endeavor. Very little had survived from the time his family had been alive and what little there was had no mention of them. Nobody had thought enough of a widowed midwife survived by only one of her two children to record much about either.

An hour of fumbling with the library equipment got him birth dates, death dates, and grave sites. Each life summed up by a couple dates and a headstone. Those little numbers meant nothing.

It wasn't enough to know them. It wasn't enough for anything.

Nobody had known they'd be important to someone, three hundred years after he'd lost his chance to ever know them again.

* * *

Staring into the pond didn't produce any new answers for Jack. He sighed as he stared at the moon's reflection, mirror-perfect in the still water.

"I guess you're probably watching the others fighting the whatsit right now, huh?" he asked. His voice sounded very loud in the stillness, but probably not loud enough to reach all the way to the moon. Manny, as usual, said nothing.

"Or maybe you're staring straight at me and still not saying anything," he went on, bitterness creeping into his voice.

He fell silent for a while, sitting at the edge of the pond where he'd died, where his sister had lived - a whole life he could have seen, could have kept alive in his memories, but hadn't known to.

Would it have hurt more to have watched her live without him than it did to know that he'd missed the chance to? Jack's grip tightened on his staff, growing angry as he realized it didn't matter. Manny had decided which experience he was going to have.

"And you still won't even tell me why."

The staff's rough wood bit into his palms.

"I could keep on asking, but at this point, that would be crazy, wouldn't it? I know what you'll say." He exhaled sharply, his lip quivering as he frowned up at the moon. "Nothing."

He waited a moment longer, hoping against hope that Manny would say something, anything - but the moon shone silently on.

"You made me," said Jack, feeling eerie echoing himself. "Maybe not from scratch, but you made me what I am now - it took you three hundred years to tell me why. Do I have to wait three hundred more years for you to tell me why it took you so long?"

Silence. Jack sighed, and his head sagged.

His eyelids were heavy. Possibly all the studying he'd done had wearied him, or maybe it was the emotional backlash of addressing the family he'd never fully know again, but he felt drained.

Maybe it was just that he was in Pennsylvania and it was the dead of summer. Summer in the northern hemisphere always made him sleepy, even when it cooled down at night.

With a sigh, he rose, pushing himself by tiptoe into the air, to rest on a tree branch overhanging the water. He was asleep in a minute, as seamlessly as if Sandy had come by to pay him a visit.

* * *

But it wasn't a golden stream of dreamsand that left a gift for him, precariously balanced in the tree branches above his head in the pre-dawn light.

The clouds covering the moon broke, and a single moonbeam stretched out from the horizon toward the sleeping frost spirit, like an apologetic hand. An early-awakening sparrow took flight, it's wings briefly tossing the moon's fading light away from Jack's face and up onto the gift in the branches. The light flickered, like someone doing a double-take before a candle, and refocused itself on the gift.

Just as the moon had nearly set, the light suddenly became very bright, spilling over Jack as if Manny was about to speak, about to wake Jack up.

_Jack -_

But before the words could be completed, the Moon dropped below the horizon and the sun's rays scoured the land of its paler cousin's light. The birds began to sing their morning greetings, as Jack was left to discover his new gift on his own.

* * *

"Muh?"

Jack opened his eyes and looked around blearily in the morning light. That was the other thing he tended to forget about summers: while there were more than a few birds around when Jack brought the snow to town, there were so many more when it was warm, and they were so very noisy.

He sat up slowly, covering a yawn with his hand and then stretching both upward over his head until it felt like his bones would crack. Well, it'd been a good nap, at least. He got a whiff of a strange smell - something like licorice, but the wind carried it away.

Something brushed against his knuckles, something too smooth to be part of the tree. He looked up just in time to take the edge of something to the face.

"Ow!"

The Whatever bounced off of Jack's head and fell into the grass below.

Eyebrows furrowed, Jack plucked his staff out of the branches near his hand and leaped out of the tree, landing lightly on the ground below.

Something glittered bright and silver in the grass.

Jack looked around to see who might have left it there before he touched it. Whoever it was had to have been able to fly, because it hadn't been there when he went to sleep. He would've been woken by anyone climbing up the tree. He saw neither hair nor hide of who it could have been.

Slowly, Jack reached down into the grass and picked up the object.

It was a cylindrical box, edged with silver. On its round surface, little silver panels were set in odd shapes that looked like phases of the moon. He fiddled with them for a moment, and found that they pressed into the box under his fingers - once he pulled back, though, each face had changed to a different moonphase.

There were very faint seams on the box, but when Jack pried at them, they didn't open - stuck in place by the various phases of the moon.

A puzzle box! Jack laughed out loud. Not only had Manny sent him a gift, he'd made it a fun one. Sure it meant a little longer to wait for answers, but Jack could wait indefinitely if he was having fun doing it. Especially when it meant that Manny wanted to have fun with him.

He hung from the branch upside down, fiddling with the box, his staff hung from the branch by its crook next to him. For a while nothing happened, but eventually, when he thought to alternate waxing crescents with full moons, the lines on the box deepened and it opened with a noise like frost settling. Jack only had time to grab his staff before the world blurred around him.

The box was closed in his hands again when everything stopped.

The puzzle box had brought him to someone's living room.

Jack landed on the couch in front of a coffee table strewn with magazines and actual coffee stains. The TV in front of him was muted. Oprah's audience was awfully (and silently) excited about something on it.

The book lying on the table caught Jack's eye. The title proclaimed in bold blue print "When Life Hands you Lessons: Getting Past your Past" superimposed over a pitcher of lemonade.

Jack picked up the book and flipped it open to a dog-eared page. A line mid-page caught his eye: "Don't be afraid of your emotional journey - embrace it! Throw yourself into the experience without fear of the end result. Feel your feelings without fear of feeling them. Let the journey be your destination, and you will arrive at a truer awareness of yourself."

"Wow," said Jack, genuinely impressed, having never read a self-help book before, or even watched many shows that weren't cartoons. "That's pretty deep."

A child's voice called from down the hall - "Did you say something, Dad?"

Jack hastily tucked the book into the pocket of his hoodie, picked up his staff from the floor, and went back to work on the puzzle box.

This time, a straight line of half-moons widened another crack in the box, and it opened with a snap like icicles cracking off and falling. The living room blurred around Jack.

This time, instead of being greeted by something indoors, he was treated to the sound of bright, joyful laughter. It was rhythmic like the pitter-patter of rain - which was falling all around him. It was pleasant, that mild temperature between cool and lukewarm, and the air smelled clean and green. Even though the sky here was gray, the rain somehow made all the other colors around him brighter by contrast. The green of the grass and the leaves and the yellows, reds, and blues of the flowers might as well have been inked, rather than grown.

Jack took to the air, flying in between the trees until the laughter grew louder.

Pushing aside some leafy branches, Jack saw movement - mainly splashing.

The splashers were women the color of rain clouds. Their skin ranged from pearly silver to the near-black of thunderclouds, and it was quite easy for Jack to see a lot of skin, what with the transparency of their rain-soaked togas. They were playing in the rain like children, splashing in puddles, spinning and dancing, laughing in voices that echoed through the mountains. A bottle was being passed between them. Jack had an instant to observe their joy - and a lot of barely-concealed body parts - before the nearest noticed him and screamed.

"Whoa! Sorry!" Jack yelled, slapping a hand over his eyes as a few of the others screeched. "Didn't mean to interrupt. Sorry, ladies, I'm on a spiritual journey. You guys look like you're having fun, though, don't let me get in the way of your good time."

Putting his hand over his eyes was entirely for their benefit. In general, he'd never really gotten the big deal with nudity. Whether it was buried under ten layers of clothing or emblazoned on billboards to sell things, it had always seemed to him that people had never really gotten their attitude towards it _right_ in the last three hundred years. It wasn't a commodity, but it wasn't shameful, either.

Besides, he appreciated the fun they were having more than anything else. Because they _were_ having fun. They were simply existing, enjoying themselves in their element, and there was nothing about them for Jack to assume was meant for anyone else, not even for each other.

Still, they hadn't expected his arrival and it was only polite he avert his eyes.

The Nysiads had stopped screaming as he covered his eyes, and none of them had run. One of them was even laughing, and her laughter broke the ice on her sisters' laughter as well.

"Well well, the Guardian of Fun drops in on _our_ fun!" said the one nearest to him, her voice only slightly slurred. Jack heard footsteps coming closer, and peeked through his fingers to see a pale grey face with eyes the blue-black of stormclouds low on the horizon. "You can open your eyes, Jack Frost. We've heard a lot about you."

Enough that they were all relaxed when Jack opened his eyes. The one nearest to him held the bottle.

Jack grinned, dropping his hand. They were all beautiful, but there was much more he found to appreciate in their joyful smiles, the glint of mischief in their eyes, than in staring at their bodies.

"So, I'm not sure why I'm here, but I'm on a spiritual journey and my magic puzzle-box thingy brought me here."

"Spiritual journey in what?" called another of the Nysiads. "You're already a pro at water-based fun."

"Maybe he has to learn to branch out into other states of being?" suggested another one. The Nysiads exchanged glances that, while still underscored by a current of joyful laughter, were surprisingly thoughtful. "Snow and rain are made of the same substance, but one plays very differently in each."

A slate-grey Nysiad with pearly-sheened hair jumped from a tree branch into a puddle, showering her sisters with another splash of fallen rain. "We need more clues!" she called, as if Jack's spiritual journey was a delightful game. "What have you learned so far?"

"Uh -" Jack reached into the pocket of his hoodie, touching the book that was there. "Well, I kinda just started, but so far, I learned that this is an emotional journey, and I shouldn't be afraid of it. So is there maybe a book or a, uh, I don't know, significant carving out here I should try to read from?"

The Nysiads all burst out laughing.

"No books out here!" one squealed, whipping her hair so that her sisters were splashed with water.

"Obviously part of your emotional journey is to learn to bring us more fun," said the nearby Nysiad, taking a swig from the bottle in her hands. She giggled again and swayed in place when she'd finished drinking. "I have deduced it. From facts."

"Share enough that _we_ can deduce like that," one of her sisters laughed, taking the bottle from her. "Jack, come and play with us until we figure out what lesson you're supposed to learn."

Well, the book had said to throw himself into the journey. The book hadn't said the journey had to be all fear and anguish, though.

"Don't mind if I do," said Jack, jumping into the nearest puddle.

They splashed and shrieked and passed the bottle around. When it reached Jack, he shrugged, and joined them. Hey, the puzzle box brought him here for a reason, right? Holding back probably wasn't the point of the whole thing.

Their play took them over and around the mountains, the rain following the Nysiads wherever they went, so that Jack took off his hoodie and wrapped it around his book to leave under a thick tree when he realized it was getting damp. They carried on, bringing the rain across the mountains. There didn't seem to be purpose in the direction the Nysiads played, but most of the mountains got watered in the process.

After enough from the bottle, Jack could barely control his laughter. He was outright giggling as he and the Nysiads collapsed beneath the trees, letting the rain drip down on their faces through the branches.

He hadn't had this much fun in ages. That wasn't from a dearth of fun, either, but the Nysiads had hearts as light as the clouds that followed them around. They knew how to live completely in each moment, letting their joy drive them forward. As much as he loved the Guardians, as much as he cared about Jamie, it was rare he met others that could manage to do that as well as he could. They were also incredibly kind, in a way that seemed to come to them easily.

"Man," he said, then stopped to giggle as the trees seemed to spin above him - maybe because of the drink, maybe because of all the spinning he'd been doing. It had been good spinning - arm-in-arm with the Nysiad who was now petting his hair, as he rested his head against her stomach. "I never knew I could have so much fun above freezing."

"Lesson: learned!" one of the Nysiads - Eriphia, he thought her name was - crowed.

Jack giggled. The others giggled too, but less because they were inebriated, and more possibly because Jack's laughter was infectious.

He wiped a tear of laughter from his eye, flicking it away with the rain. "Why didn't I stop by and visit you ladies sooner?" he wondered, as the rain dripped on his face. He wiped it away, clearing space for new drops to fall._ I'm never going to associate rain on my face with anything but this again_, he thought, and considered that before, he'd never been comfortable with the feeling of being wet, and for a very good reason.

"Well, we're glad you did," said Cisseis, who was delicately running her fingers through his hair. "You're a sweet little soul, Jack Frost."

"You can come play with us in the rain anytime," added Ambrosia.

"Thanks," said Jack, warmth filling his heart at having made new friends. "You guys are the_ best_. I mean, that, the _best_. You're the first friends I've made since...since the Guardians, I guess! And they were my first friends!" He laughed again, as some of the Nysiads cooed in sympathy. "It's like, I went so long without making any friends, and now they're just falling into my lap - or, uh, I'm falling into theirs, I guess."

They all laughed at that.

"Maybe that's your lesson," Polymno suggested. "To make friends on your journey."

"Maybe," agreed Jack. But that still didn't seem to apply to his original reason for wanting answers in the first place. "Maybe Manny wants me to know that if I keep moving forward, there will be new friends in the future! New people I can care about." He cleared more rain from his face again. "Or maybe he just wanted me to be able to enjoy the rain on my face, without thinking of...of other stuff."

He veered away from mention of his drowning, feeling even as he did that it was a little too late. But Cisseis sighed thoughtfully beneath him, and when Erato spoke, her voice was reminiscent, but not sad.

"That's important," she said, taking a swig from the bottle before dropping her hand to the damp grass again. "Moving on - that's a lesson we learned once, a long time before we heard of you."

"Before you were a mortal boy who could only _dream_ of dancing half-naked in the rain with beautiful nymphs," said Eriphia, and for the first time in his whole day of doing just that, Jack blushed.

"Did you know, we used to go by another name?" said Erato, clearly not finished with her reminiscing. "We used to be the Hyades, when we didn't dance in the rain - we wept it."

Jack's drunken heart clenched at the thought of the playful Nysiads weeping a rainstorm. "That's so sad," he said. "That's the saddest thing I've heard in years."

"I know!" called Pedile, throwing her hands in the air. "It was_ so_ sad."

"The saddest," echoed Nysa.

"We were sad for so _long_," said Cisseis, holding her hands out as if to illustrate the age of time of their sadness. "Our brother Hyas was killed in a hunting accident, and we felt like we'd never be happy again."

"When we were mortal, our tears fell like rain, and so we became nymphs of the rain, and it fell as our tears," said Bromia, picking up the tale. "So we went on as we had done in mortal life, weeping over the mountains of Nysa. For years, and years, and years -"

"And you know, Jack, how difficult it is for things of our kind to change," said Erato. "But even we couldn't go on weeping forever."

"Yes, grieving is hard work," agreed Ambrosia, "and sorrow is so hard to maintain when the world just keeps spinning on, the grass keeps growing, children keep laughing far away -"

"So in time, we came to want more from our eternity than to always be in sorrow," said Coronis. "But at the same time, we wanted to remember our brother. And we wanted the world to remember him."

"So what did you do?" Jack asked thoughtfully, letting their words wash over him like the rain that was falling down on them all.

As one, the Nysiads lifted their hands, and parted the rain clouds.

The stars shone down from the deep blue sky, evening sliding over them unseen beyond the rain clouds.

"You see, there?" said Cisseis, pointing to a cluster of stars above them. "That is what we did."

"You...uh..." Jack squinted, trying to figure out what they meant by pointing. "...help me out here?"

"We gave our grief to the staaaaars," said Eriphia, wiggling her fingers at the clouds. She burst into laughter, as if relieved all over again to be able to laugh once more. Moonlight started to peek around the edges of the hole in the clouds but then the Nysiads closed it up again.

"Those stars had no name, so we gave them ours," said Pedile. "We had been the Hyades, weeping over Hyas, but we let something else be monument to our brother, something other than our lives."

"He wouldn't have wanted us to live our lives mourning him," said Bromia. "He would have wanted us to_ have_ lives. Like, who spends their entire lives in mourning, anyway? If all you do is relive death, can it be called a life?"

"Deep," said Polymno. Bromia passed her the bottle.

"Now we are the Nysiads," said Cisseis, "and sometimes, we look to the Hyades, and remember. Once in a while, we are sad a little. But we can remember, now, without being sad all the time."

"So...you let go of the past," said Jack slowly. "Without forgetting someone you cared about. You were able to do both."

Sobriety was starting to come back in full force and with it came a new clarity. Was that what Manny was trying to tell him? Honor his family but move on? Maybe someday he'd have to do that with Jamie, too.

Excitement started to rise up in his gut over possibly having learned the lesson.

"I think that's it. I think that's what Manny was trying to help me understand! The book said something about how how yesterday is the past and that's why it doesn't last, and something about how our eyes are in the front of our heads because you're supposed to move forward."

With that, he sat and scrambled for his staff, picking it up from where he'd left it lying in the grass. Bouncing excitedly in place, he said. "I need to go back to the puzzle box!"

"Yay," Coronis cheered. "Puzzle box!"

"What puzzle box?" whispered Pedile. Arsinoe shrugged.

Jack bounced in place. "I left it with my hoodie. C'mon!"

He bounded off on a breeze and the Nysiads rose to follow him. They ran over the mountains, back to where they'd begun their play several hours ago, where Jack's hoodie and the book inside it still waited. The puzzle box still sat next to them, speckled with rainwater.

The Nysiads "ooh'd" as Jack picked it up. He held it out to them eagerly, as they gathered around to look at the ornately carved toy.

"The Man in the Moon left it for me," he said. "It brought me to this house, where I got this book -" he pulled the book out of his hoodie, and the Nysiads all politely held out their hands to cover it from the rain. "It has all this stuff in it about going on an emotional journey. Listen to this -"

He cleared his throat before he began reading. "Yesterday is the past, and as any child will tell you, the past doesn't last." That part sounded a little suspect - what kid ever said that? Jack shrugged it off and moved on. "You can keep your mind on the past all you want, but you'll never live in it. You'll never even see it. Our eyes are in the front of our heads because we're meant to move_ forward_."

The Nysiads glanced at each other, lips pressed together in the polite not-smiles of people who'd read more than a few books and were trying not to tear down the enthusiasm of someone who was still a little green on reading for self-improvement. They chorused a few halfhearted variations on "Lovely," and "Deep."

"Yeah," said Jack, his enthusiasm undeterred. He pulled his hoodie back on, and tucked the book back in the pocket. "I think that might be the biggest part of it, but there still might be more I need to do."

He held out his arms.

"Ladies, this is goodbye. Once I figure out the next combination, this thing will magic me away to the next place I need to be. Thank you for the lesson - and for the great day. I'm really glad I met you guys."

All of them "awwwed" and swarmed in to hug him and kiss him all over his face.

Jack was still grinning as he leaned his staff against his shoulder and started fiddling with the puzzle box again.

The Nysiads started calling out helpful suggestions.

"Try twisting that one sideways."

"Slide to the left."

"Slide to the right."

"Criss-cross."

Snickers all around.

"Nope, still not working," said Jack as he fussed with the puzzle box.

"Do a barrel roll!"

"Ooh ooh, build a little fence around it!"

"Now you're just being silly," Jack chuckled.

He did try tilting it slightly, though, and that meant one of the tiles slid into what was apparently the perfect configuration.

The last thing he heard before being whisked away was the Nysiads cheering at his success.

The last thing the Nysiads heard as Jack disappeared was a sound less like the whirling of a magic portal, and more like something tearing apart from the fabric of the universe and fluttering away.

Their cheers died away into sudden silence. The sisters glanced at each other, mouths open in surprise as the sound died away.

Bromia broke the silence - "Was it supposed to sound like that?"

* * *

The journey went on, more quickly this time, as Jack read more of the book and fell into the rhythm of journey and lesson.

There was Kyöpelinvuori, where he had some long riddle games with the witches there, and Jack learned it was okay to have mixed feelings on the important things, that nothing was ever truly black and white when it came to the past. ("The feelings you feel are real, no matter how complicated they are," the book said.)

A two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, where he played an overlong game of monopoly with the kids who lived there. The eight year old boy turned out to be quite the budding young capitalist, and at the end of the hour, his older sister flipped the board in frustration. ("Personal gain should never be prioritized at the expense of one's relationship with loved ones in the search for true success.")

An Auto Shop. ("Nothing ever stays perfect. Everything breaks sometime, what matters is that you fix it!") The peak of Mount Fuji. ("Solitude doesn't always have to mean loneliness. Sometimes the best you you can be is the you that's you when you're just alone with you." ). Buckingham Palace. (Jack had no clue on this one but as always, he enjoyed the guys in the funny hats.)

By the time Jack had cycled through two days' worth of travel (strangely, for a puzzle from the Man in the Moon, the box always teleported him to somewhere with daylight), the lessons he was learning were starting to become more facetious.

"Okay, I've learned I don't want to be alone on a creepy, windswept rock island with a single leafless tree bearing a lone ripe plum," said Jack, eyeing the obviously cursed fruit and fiddling with his puzzle box on the alarmingly silent island. He was relieved first when that lesson seemed to suffice, and second when the box brought him somewhere populated.

He landed on a subway platform strewn with midday travellers. The signs were in English, and the murmur of accents around him suggested he was in London again. A small girl with her hand in her mother's spotted him, and her face burst into a gaping smile of wonder. Jack grinned at her and waved, but before he could do anything else, heard something that drew his attention far away from the little girl - a distant, but loud, roar emanating from deep within the subway.

He glanced around at the adults, but none of them appeared to have heard anything. The little girl looked scared, though, and Jack gave her a reassuring smile. Her mother squeezed the girl's' hand back, but didn't look away from her phone, her brow furrowed in deep thought. Jack glanced into the darkness of the subway tunnel, then back to the little girl, who didn't look entirely reassured. He blew up a snowflake, and with a puff of breath, sent it spinning over to land on the mother's nose. Instantly she blinked, looked up from her phone with a smile just touched with wonder, and smiled down at her daughter. They were playing patty-cake as Jack took off down the subway tunnel, towards the source of the roar.

The tubes were dangerous, even for a spirit. He listened intently for the sounds of oncoming cars, and more importantly, for the strange sound he'd heard before. It wasn't quite like a lion, but it was wild and furious. It wasn't close to the roar of oncoming cars - such as the one coming just then, as Jack flattened himself to the wall and waited for the train to streak by.

In the taillight of the departing train, he saw a hole in the ground beneath the tracks. He quickly blew out a stream of snowflakes over the hole, and they danced upwards on a draft. The train departed, taking the last of the light with it, and Jack felt his way blindly to the hole, feeling the very slight draft coming from it.

An itch at the back of his brain stopped him from jumping in. He'd been down this road before - this road of hasty, impetuous jaunts after underestimated enemies into places unknown. His quest might be taking him somewhere dangerous - and it might be time to get the others to come and help him face it. The book hadn't said anything about having to go alone when that wasn't your only option.

The puzzle box shook softly in his pocket, as if encouraging him of his safety. Well, perhaps not his safety. "Safe" wasn't a state the Guardians sought for themselves very much. Perhaps the box was reassuring him more of his competence.

He couldn't let fear stop him from getting the truth. Jack jumped through the hole without further hesitation.

He landed on the floor of a dark tunnel, the only light dimly filtering in through the hole above, and started to feel his way along. The wall was slimy, but the only guide he had to move forward by. He iced up the tips of his fingers so he didn't have to feel the slime whenever he pressed them against it.

He ducked around a corner and saw light ahead.

It was not the kind of light one wanted to see at the end of a dark tunnel. Two beady eyes glowed in the dark like blue flames and a low growl reverberated through the tunnel.

"Whatever or whoever you are," Jack said quietly, in case the creature in the dark was sentient. "I just need to get through here. I won't hurt you if you don't hurt me."

It lunged at him in the dark. Claws scratched at his hoodie and teeth snapped right in front of his face, as the weight of the beast behind them knocked him backward. Jack used the momentum of the lunging creature as to kick it off of him and scrambled to his feet. He blasted in the direction he thought it was, but must have missed. Another roar blared from his left and he was bowled over yet again. This time the teeth managed to get a mouthful of his hood. The creature ripped through his hoodie, scraping the skin underneath. It shook its head furiously, knocking Jack's head back and forth.

Jack pointed his staff at the beast's glowing eyes and blasted them with ice. It yelped and let go, backing off into the dark, but now its eyes were closed against the ice and as it fell silent, Jack had no way of knowing where it was.

In the meantime, he had no doubts it could sense where he was by smell.

Still, smell could tell it where Jack was but not where the wall of the tunnel was.

Jack positioned himself just slightly in front of the wall, waiting for it to lunge at him again.

It growled, and its claws scrabbled against the stone. A heavy body thudded towards him. Jack waited until he didn't dare wait any longer, hands gripping fitfully at his staff, and felt the creature lunge at him again. Once again he rolled back, using his legs to kick the beast off of him, but this time, he brought his staff up and blasted at the monster, slamming it into the tunnel wall hard.

The hideous crunch that followed made Jack cringe, and the pitiful whine that followed after made him feel sick to his stomach.

Then there was silence.

Jack stood completely still in the dark, waiting and listening, his heart thudding in his chest, but no new attack was forthcoming. Rather than stick around, he slowly moved forward in the dark, until he reached the end of the tunnel nearby. He touched the wall there and a massive round door slid away, letting in dim light from beyond.

Jack looked back to see what he'd fought. A massive black dog lay dead on the ground. It's fur was an inky black that seemed to suck in the light, and the sight of it made Jack suck in an inadvertent gasp of air.

Even Jack knew the significance of what he was looking at. Myths weren't immune to the dread the creature caused, and creatures like it were an omen to them as well as to humans, an omen so dire it chilled even Jack to the bone, when his body was chilled already.

It was a black dog.

A death omen.

Jack looked beyond the tunnel door into the strange twilight that came from nowhere, and saw that it fell on a crossroads. A place where several dirt paths met.

It made sense, given that black dogs often hung around crossroads, though what said roads were doing underground was beyond him.

Jack walked down the dirt path, to where the four roads met.

He'd seen a black dog. He'd_ killed_ a black dog. What did that even mean? It was bad enough that a death omen had been waiting for him, but did it mean something even worse to have killed one?

Jack was, metaphorically - and literally - at a crossroads and he had no idea if this meant he should turn back.

But what if this was a test? What if he was meant to overcome fear and move forward? Manny had set these tasks before him, as a way of figuring himself out, of trusting himself enough to discover what he needed to discover about himself and his past.

And he trusted Manny. Despite leaving him alone for all that time, the Man in the Moon had saved his life. He'd made it so Jack had been able to experience a myriad of joys he hadn't in a mortal life cut short. He'd chosen him as a Guardian, given him a cause he believed in, and a group of friends - new family - that loved him.

He trusted Manny as much as he often resented him. That was why he took that first step down the dirt road in front of him. Somehow, it just felt right to choose that road. Jack deemed his decision reinforced as the other two roads melted away.

He felt compelled to keep walking forward, one foot after another, in a way that was similar to Bunny's tunnels propelling people along. Jack couldn't have turned back if he wanted to and it seemed to him that he was somehow moving along at a great distance with comparatively few steps.

His walk finally brought him to a huge doorway. Statues of two knights stood at each side of it, their hands resting on the pommels of their swords. Jack had an intense feeling of foreboding as he stood before them, and knew somehow this was some sort of test. He eyed the swords with apprehension.

His fear was justified as he stepped forward. The knights lifted their swords up and crossed them overhead with a clang. The slits in their helmets suddenly lit up and their deep voices reverberated through Jack's very being.

**ONLY THE WORTHY MAY ENTER HERE. STEP FORWARD AND BE JUDGED.**

**FEAR NOTHING IF YOU ARE VIRTUOUS. FEAR EVERYTHING IF YOU ARE NOT.**

Jack hope he counted as virtuous. He did brave things, didn't he? He protected kids, tried his best to be there for his friends, tried his best to be kind. He could only hope that was enough and trust that Manny wouldn't put him into danger.

Sucking in a deep breath, Jack took a cautious step forward, eying the swords over his head with trepidation. Nothing happened. Taking another step, he felt a strange tingle go through him, but it quickly passed and then he was on the other side of the archway. The knights dropped their swords back to rest in front of them and light in the visors of the knight's helmets went out.

What lay before him beyond the doorway inspired only awe. It was the ruins of a massive castle that had somehow sunk underground. The same dim light that came from nowhere cast shadows over ever edifice, but Jack could tell that in the light of day, this place had been beautiful once. It's grey, dingy walls had clearly once been a bright white, and crumbled carvings adorned the walls - what was left of them was lovely. Jack made his way in through the open doors, taking to the air as he looked around. Tattered tapestries adorned the walls, their colors dim and dingy, depicting knights fighting valiant battles and mystical creatures like unicorns and dragons.

Jack passed by a massive throne room with a white throne stained grey with time, and beyond that was a room that made him gasp aloud.

In it was a table, a massive round table. Twelve seats sat around it, the wooden chairs now mostly rotten. Names had been etched in them in gold once, but that had mostly worn away. At one end of the table was a massive stone seat, carved with intricate designs. Carved on the wall behind it were words:

**THE ANSWERS YOU SEEK LIE HERE. WHOSOEVER SITS IN THIS SEAT WILL BE GIFTED WITH THE SIGHT OR INSIGHT THEY SEEK.**

Pretty straightforward.

Jack took a step towards the chair, then stopped.

It was a little_ too_ straightforward.

The last time he'd been handed something that was supposed to solve all his problems, it had come at a great cost. Yes, the puzzle box from Tooth's palace had given him his memories and helped him figure out who he was, but gaining it from Pitch had made the Guardians lose trust in him. It had come closer to killing Bunny than any amount of dangerous other creatures had ever managed. Obsessing over it - and gunning for Pitch - had made him leave Baby Tooth behind to be captured as a hostage. This sort of ease had once very nearly ruined everything - not just for him, but for all of his strange new family, and for the children of the world.

It was never_ that_ easy. Life didn't just magically hand out answers and every action had consequences. That was a lesson that he'd come by the hard way. Sometimes he was rash and still slipped up, but it was still a lesson he'd taken to heart.

He stepped forward and examined the chair more closely, rather than just plopping his butt into the seat.

The puzzle box rattled in the pocket of his hoodie, as if urging him to sit, but he ignored it and pulled aside the rotting cloth that covered the chair. Other words were carved there in a version of English even older than what was carved on the wall.

It took a moment for the translation magic that came with being a Guardian to kick in since the language was so old, but Jack sucked in a deep, horrified breath when they translated.

**WHOSOEVER TAKES THIS SEAT, BE HE STRONG OR BE HE FRAIL,**

**MUST ONLY BE THE ONE WHO IS WORTHY TO SEEK OUT THE HOLY GRAIL.**

**ALL OTHERS WHO DARE TO TAKE THIS SEAT SHALL FIND TO THEIR DISMAY,**

**THAT THEY SHALL BE CAST INTO THE DARK, NEVER AGAIN TO SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY.**

The puzzle box rattled even more in his pocket and Jack took it out. The little moons on the top moved around to form jagged words.

**Take the seat and you'll see into the past. You_ are_ worthy, Jack.**

A message from Manny.

A message that couldn't be true, couldn't be real.

There were a few things Jack was now sure of about himself. He was a good person, certainly, maybe even a hero sometimes. And maybe, despite all of that silence, Manny cared. That didn't mean that he was good enough to be worthy of surviving a cursed object like this. Jack didn't know a lot of mythical history like Bunny or the others but he did know one thing about Arthur's knights - there was a lot of emphasis on purity, on being virtuous to the point of ludicrousness.

Jack was honest enough with himself to know he was good, but flawed, like many people were. Manny had to know that, too, because one thing Jack knew for sure was that even if the Man in the Moon had said nothing, he had most likely been watching over him for most of his life, and that meant he'd seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. Manny probably had a clear picture of who he was even if he'd left him alone during all the time he'd _grown_ into who he was.

This was a trap. This entire thing _had_ to be a trap.

"Oh nonono," he said to the puzzle box, with it's possibly-deadly suggestion. "Time to get my butt away from that chair and get it the heck out of here."

For once, just for once, he'd been wise enough to figure the trap out before he'd tripped it. Carefully, he set the moon puzzle box - something he now knew was quite possibly dangerous - on the round table.

He turned and made a beeline for the door out of the the room. It was probably almost time for him to meet up with Bunny like he'd promised he would a few days ago, before the other Guardian mission. They had an arrangement to play some pranks on a film set.

That was when he heard the clicking. It was the single most ominous sound he'd ever heard in his life. Jack turned back, eyes wide, and saw the puzzle box's moving parts unfolding to the clicking of the clockwork inside it.

Shadow shapes exploded out of the puzzle box and surged towards him in an overwhelming wave. His staff was ripped from his hand and he was slammed against the floor, the blow knocking the wind out of him. The shadows dragged him violently across the stone, drawing him inexorably towards the foreboding chair. Amidst the shadows dragging him he saw glowing yellow eyes and manes and knew in an instant exactly who was behind all this.

The deafening whinnies of the nightmares sounded in his ears as he was slammed into the chair, into what could only be the Siege Perilous, and restrained there by nightmare sand. There was no need for them to hold him down, though - the minute he touched the seat, nearly every muscle in his body was paralyzed.

The room blurred as a terrifying shape materialized in front of him, a flaming creature in a shape that was just not quite enough like a dragon to calm down his terrified and overactive imagination.

"Please, I didn't mean to," Jack wheezed, still breathless from being slammed into the floor. He was only able to move his mouth, nothing else . "They made me sit here, I'm not trying to -"

The creature interrupted him. In a voice more ancient than even some of his friends, the creature said in tones that sounded like metal scraping against granite:

**YOU. ARE. NOT. WORTHY.**

"I know I'm not, I'm sorry, but I wasn't trying to sit here, they made me, they made me -" Jack cried out, but the seat of the chair fell out from under him, as a great and terrible wind sucked him into the black void below. Jack clung to the edges of the Siege as hard as he could, but between the nightmares forcing him down and the suction of the void, he knew he wasn't going to be able to hang on for long.

Jack had the strangest sense that the dark was waiting for him - just for him - and it filled him with more horror than he'd ever felt in his long life.

"I swear, I didn't mean to sit here, just let me go and I'll leave!" Jack said, struggling furiously against the nightmares as they plucked at his fingers and lunged into the hole to pull him harder into the swirling dark. "I promise I'll lea -"

His fingers ffinally slipped and he spun off into the dark.

"-eeaaAAAAUGH!"

The last thing he saw was the light in the eyes of the triumphant night-mares before he was lost to the dark, and lost to a cold greater than any he'd ever felt. For a moment, all he knew was fear and then he knew no more.

* * *

It was Fall, and that meant the workshop at the North Pole was in full-swing. North hummed his way through a Stravinsky record while chipping quickly away at an ice sculpture. He hadn't left his workshop in the two days since returning from his last mission, working straight away on new wonders for the upcoming Christmas. He was having a good streak, still going strong without even the need for a bracing walk around the arctic tundra to clear his head, so deep in his work that he didn't hear his own name being called until the caller had lost his (admittedly short) patience with North.

"Wouldja drop the chisel and lend me one of those sad excuses for ears, you bloody yobbo? We've got a problem."

North did indeed drop the chisel, in surprise at finding himself not the only non-elf in the room. "Bunny!" He stood up, clapping the pooka on both shoulders, a gesture that froze Bunny completely for a moment as he tensed up against the contact. "Old friend, you are always welcome, but how many times have I told you to knock?"

"You've never had to," said Bunny, grouchily, but then, North was accustomed to "grouchy" as Bunny's default state of being. "North, did you hear a word I said?"

"Ah," North shrugged as he stretched kinks he didn't have out of his back, then bustled over to one of his workshop cabinets for refreshments. "You know how it is, deadlines coming, inspiration, she is striking - I am getting lost in my work. Fruitcake?"

Bunny glanced at the proffered fruitcake, temporarily distracted, then back at North. "Have you seen Jack lately?"

"Jack Frost!" North exclaimed, always happy to have reason to think of the youngest Guardian. "Jack Frost! Hah! Well it seems if he is coming into my workshop, he is not as determined to get my attention as you. You have asked yeti?"

"We were supposed to do something," Bunny went on. "We were gonna do a run on the set of some movie. We were gonna steal everyone's left shoe and put them all on some fruit loop actor's trailer."

"Yes, I know, you are friends now! Hope and Fun, playing jokes on the world - is very good thing," said North, setting down the fruitcake, genuinely pleased but still eager to get back to his deadlines.

Bunny leaped directly over his head, landing on the cabinet before North could set the fruitcake on it. "You're not hearing me, North. Jack didn't show."

The switch flipped in North's brain, and his expression went from jovial to more than concerned in an instant.

"Not a word from him?" he asked.

Bunny shook his head. "Not a one."

North put the fruitcake down and picked up his swords.

Minutes later, North and Bunny were waiting by the globe as the aurora signal put out the call to the other Guardians. It only took a few more minutes for Sandy, Tooth, and Anansi to appear, and Jack was notably not with them.

"But Jack never misses a chance to spend time with any of us," Tooth said, when she'd been brought up to speed.

"Three hundred years of starving for affection will make a boy punctual when it is offered to him," said Anansi, and each Guardian looked at him with slight consternation, as if to say "well you didn't exactly offer him any either" without starting the argument of saying it.

"He's definitely in trouble," Bunny insisted. He was more highly strung than usual, his movements twitchy with worry. "I tracked his scent to his pond at Burgess, but the scent trail there vanishes completely. If he'd flown away on the wind, I'd still have something to follow him by, but there's nothing. I'd say he'd vanished completely, if I hadn't caught a fresher whiff of him in Alberta on the way here."

"But he is still around?" Tooth asked, darting slightly in place from concern.

"Still around, but leaving no trail to follow." North nodded, "hmm-"ing over the problem. "Jack does not have that kind of magic - very suspicious. We must track by witnesses, not scent. Maybe he is appearing in places besides Alberta. Let's go find out."

"Did you smell anything else at the pond?" Tooth asked Bunny, as the Guardians took off to the sleigh launch caverns. "Any trace of someone that might have taken Jack?"

"I smelled something all right," said Bunny, wrinkling his nose. "Enough anise to knock out anyone with a half-decent nose for a mile around. I could barely smell Jack beyond it, and that pond reeks of him. Something was covering their tracks, something that knew I'd come looking."

"Do you think it was Pitch?" Tooth asked, the worry in her voice intensifying as they all fell silent at the question.

Bunny had long since told them all about his concerns over Pitch's obsession with Jack, since he'd observed that such an obsession existed in their last fight with the Boogeyman years ago in a midwestern American steel foundry. He didn't say anything as he looked at Tooth, his expression mirroring her concern, then to Anansi.

The spider couldn't predict the future - not to a science - but he knew and felt the threads of stories in the world in a way that came of expertise as much as of innate ability. He called it "being genre savvy," whatever that meant.

Anansi scratched his chin with one of his spider legs, pushing his green-lensed sunglasses up the bridge of his nose with one of his human hands. "Something might take advantage of Pitch's obvious status as primary antagonist to pit him as a red herring -"

Sandy floated in front of Anansi, a wry expression on his face. A sand cloud above his head formed a book covered with illegible patterns, that reformed to clearly read "Once upon a time -"

"-Sorry," said Anansi, grinning placatingly at the Sandman. "Once again, for the unfamiliar - someone may be framing him, knowing we would suspecting him. If that is the case, then this story should be a minor stitch in our larger tapestry, concluded, oh -" he shrugged. "Quickly."

"And if it_ is_ Pitch?" asked Tooth.

"Then this story will not be over quickly," Anansi said, dryly.

"In that case," said North, pulling a snowglobe from his pocket as the reindeer pulled the sleigh into position, and they climbed in - "I say we call in backup now, before Pitch is rearing his head."

An image of Burgess appeared in the snowglobe as he swirled it in his hand. North cracked the reins and sent the reindeer charging down the sleigh launch and into open air.

They'd been reluctant to pull children into danger before - and they were still reluctant.

But Jamie had proven himself time and again as a stronger force against the Boogeyman than anything they had ever seen before - and the boy cared for Jack as much as they did. He deserved the chance to help save his friend, since he was capable of doing it. And their past campaigns against Pitch had given them reason to believe they might need all the help they could get.

* * *

The quiet sunday afternoon in Burgess found an Amazon queen and a time-travelling Space Agent locked in a struggle for the fate of time itself.

"Mighty Hippolyta! Sink another basket! The world depends on your jump-shot!"

The sparkly-tutu'd Hippolyta threw another one of her incomparable jump-shots, and the basketball net affixed above the Bennet garage swished the sound of victory.

"We've won!" Hippolyta, as played by Cupcake, cheered. She whirled to the short pyramid of hay bales in the Bennett yard, and the pumpkin-headed Aztec High Priest that sat jauntily atop it. "Now you must honor your oath and free the sacrifices, or face the wrath of the Amazon Queen."

The time-travelling Space Agent covered his mouth, abruptly switching characters as he gave voice to the villainous High Priest. "You're too late, foreign infidels! It has already begun!"

Jamie Bennet uncovered his mouth, once again the noble and ingenious Space Agent from the Time Bureau of 3031. "The rift! It's already opening! We have to free the sacrifices, or the world will end in blood!"

"_Never_!" howled Hippolyta, as she charged yelling to the straw pyramid, wielding her mighty pool noodle in defense of the innocent beanie babies tied to the grill of the Bennet car.

Jamie laughed as Cupcake beat up an imaginary evil priest with the pool noodle. It wasn't hard to imagine her as an _actual_ Amazon, or maybe a superhero, defending the innocent (another game they often played). Jamie could easily picture her growing up to be someone that helped people like that, like a police officer or a firefighter. That's what he liked about her - what they played might be pretend, but it showed what kind of person Cupcake was for real and he just really liked that person.

When they'd saved the day and collapsed at the foot of the straw pyramid, Jamie grinned at her. "I'm really glad you're willing to still play pretend."

Cupcake grinned back. "Yeah, I'm glad you are too. I think the others are a little too eager to grow up to do it anymore." Cupcake rolled her eyes. "I don't think growing up sounds all that great if it means you have to stop having fun or believing in things that are important. I don't know what's up with the others."

They were the only two in the neighborhood who, at ages eleven and twelve, still had the yen to play pretend. It might have been lonely for both of them - if they hadn't already been used to carrying the games of pretend for a few months by that time. Even Claude and Caleb were only up for basketball when it was actually basketball, and not a pretend game of ullamaliztli for their lives.

They were the only two who still admitted to listening for reindeer on the rooftops at Christmas, to waking up early trying to catch a glimpse of eggs running into place on Easter.

Maybe the other preteens of Burgess would have paused, at the sight of a massive sleigh coming in to land with a noise like a spaceship powering down on the street in front of the house, but not Cupcake and Jamie. They only charged over, their faces alight with wonder - and Jamie's mixed with urgency.

"Let me guess," said Jamie, as he came to a stop beside the sleigh, glancing around the sleigh for the missing Guardian. "Jack's in trouble again?"

"We reckon," said Bunny.

Jamie heaved a long-suffering sigh that didn't mask the glee he still felt at being party to Guardian business, and climbed aboard. "What a damsel."

"Hello Cupcake," said Tooth, politely, waving with a smile to the Amazon Queen.

Cupcake was almost too delighted to speak. She hadn't seen the Guardians since she was 8, and aside from a brief visit from Jack at her snowed-in school during the awful blizzard a few years back, it was her first time seeing them all again.

Her spell broke as Jamie climbed aboard the sleigh. "Scoot over," she said, following him on and shoving him into Sandy to clear a space for her. She plunked onto the seat without waiting to be invited.

"Uh -" said Jamie, as she did. "Not that I'm objecting, but - this might be dangerous. Scary and dangerous."

They played at fighting terrible things - but they both knew, Jamie a little more than Cupcake, that actually facing nightmares was a different story.

"Please," said Cupcake, raising her eyebrow at Jamie with a smile. "Jack is the damsel of this group, remember? And who said there was only room for one fearless kid on Santa's sleigh?"

"It..._will_ be dangerous," Bunny said, glancing at Tooth and Sandy as they shared reluctant glances over bringing any more children than they needed to into a fight.

"Like fighting the Boogeyman?" Cupcake sassed. "I've been wanting to give that jerk a face full of my boot ever since Jamie got to. You know I have bigger shoes than Jamie, right?"

The Guardians all glanced between each other, trying to contain their charmed smiles at Cupcake's audacity and daring.

She was at that age when little girls who were audacious and daring often had that beaten out of them by the people around them who wanted to mold all young girls into similarly narrow boxes. If she was holding on to her most heroic self, they weren't going to help get rid of it. They would gladly do the exactly opposite

"I like this one," said Anansi, reaching one of his spiderlegs towards Cupcake. "She is full of fire. Why didn't we bring her along sooner?"

Cupcake slapped the leg away. "Who's the spider guy and why is he touching me?" she demanded.

"I'm not touching you," Anansi said, waving three of his legs an inch around Cupcake's shoulders. "Look! See how I am not touching her!"

"In a minute I'm gonna touch you pretty hard!" Cupcake threatened, rising from her seat with her hand in a fist to wave at the Guardian of Stories.

"Anansi! Cupcake!" North barked. "Separate sides of sleigh! Do not make me hand reins to Jamie!"

Jamie's face lit up in a huge grin at the prospect of being handed the reins. "Guys, don't stop now -"

But North cracked the reins and the entire team was forced back into their seats as the reindeer charged down the road and into the sky, North swirling the snowglobe in his hand to display their next destination.

* * *

Jack hurt all over when he woke up. That was the very first thing he was aware of, a strange cold ache from his muscles like he'd been dragged through a massive pane of freezing glass. It was if he'd fallen through a skylight from the light of the waking world into the icy darkness of nightmares.

Abruptly, he opened his eyes and sat up, casting about for his staff.

It was nowhere to be found.

Jack scuttled back against the nearest wall, gritting his teeth in frustration. A sense of vulnerability settled over him without his staff, and he looked around, gasping raggedly at his surroundings. The same dim light illuminated this place that had lit the castle, but in here, it was somehow even bleaker than outside.

Massive stone walls rose up around him, with multiple paths visible at the ends of the pathway he was currently in. It looked like a maze. Jack climbed to his feet, his body still trembling, and took a few tenuous steps to the end of the path. More tunnels led silently away in all directions. It was a maze, one full of silence and dust and dreary gray light that felt like it wasn't even distant cousins with the light of the sun.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" came a voice behind him. Jack jumped, instinctually moving away from the shadows and from the person he knew was hiding in them.

Pitch melted out of the darkness, his hands folded behind his back.

"Darkness and dust and horrors that made those who fell in here wish there was emptiness instead. It's a masterpiece. I wish I could take credit for it, but it's the creation of myths so old that even I would never have heard of them."

"I don't know what your game is this time, Pitch, but the others -"

"The others don't know where you are," said Pitch, much too calm, much too triumphant already for Jack's comfort. "You didn't tell them where you were going and the puzzle box would've made you nearly impossible to track. Wonderful little device, isn't it? I had it specially made by someone who has no love lost for the Guardians. The rest was all me, of course."

Pitch waved his hand with a flourish, clearly proud of himself.

"All it took was some nightmare sand masquerading as clouds too keep off the prying eyes of the Man in the Moon, a handful of stolen dreamsand to put you to sleep, anise oil so the rabbit couldn't track me by scent..."

Pitch did a little dance move that looked like a soft shoe.

"And the self-help book, that was a nice touch, wasn't it? Oooh, if only I'd realized long ago that it could be this_ easy_." His mouth widened into a crooked grin. "They're never going to find this place. After a while, they'll just stop looking. You'll see - they won't care about you enough to keep at it for as long as it would take. That's the _point_ of this, Jack. I'm doing this to _help_ you - to help you see the truth."

"Oh yeah, and what's that? The fact that you're crazier than a bag full of weasels?"

"The truth is that they don't care about you. You may think they do, but there are things they care for more. They'll won't choose you at the expense of their precious missions - their precious belief. You'll be here long enough to see that, long enough for them to give up on you."

Jack lunged forward, but Pitch slipped into the shadows again, and Jack slammed his fists against the wall behind where he'd once stood instead.

He felt a presence behind him. Pitch whispered in his ear, his voice filled with some monstrous mix of longing and hatred.

"You should have accepted my offer in Antarctica, Jack."

Jack turned to throw a punch, but Pitch had already disappeared again.

"Pitch! Get back here and face me!" Jack roared. "Pitch!"

There was no answer, only the echo of his voice through the stone pathways.

"Pitch!"

Jack looked up at the bleak gray light from nowhere, at walls that were too tall to climb and did the only thing he could do - he started walking. There had to be a way out of here. If he walked long enough and far enough, he'd find it - provided the Guardians didn't find him first and make Pitch eat his words.

How big could this place be, anyway? he thought, not knowing that if he could fly up over the walls, he'd see a labyrinth that went out in every direction as far as the eye could see, filled with_ things_ that were never meant to see the light of day.


	2. Chapter 2

**Author's Note:** Just to let folks know that, while we'll be using some of the book history, we treat the movie - and this series - as more of an adaptation. So things aren't going to be identical to the books.

Also, giving credit where it's due: some of the odd items in the maze were pulled from the old tabletop RPG setup, Warehouse 23.

* * *

**The Boy Who Found Fear At Last**

by Kira, Kate, and Kaylin

* * *

**Chapter 2**

"Santa! He's on my side again!"

"I am not! I am three times her size! I get three quarters of the bench!"

"That is so not how benches work! And you're reaching over Jamie!"

"Jamie is part of my quarters. He is a storyteller. Stories are my domain. I have blessed him as my own. My side is his side."

Jamie, squashed between Cupcake and Anansi, hissed a breath in as Anansi squashed him to his side in a spider-legged hug. "I don't know, Santa, things are getting pretty crazy back here. Maybe you should come and deal with this. I can take the reins for a moment." His eyes shone with eagerness that betrayed his false tension.

"Hah!" North barked out a laugh. "Children of all ages, if I had time to turn this sleigh around, I would still say sort it out amongst yourselves! We have places to be, people to visit! Hold on!"

He tossed another snowglobe, portalling to the opposite side of the planet, where the stars glimmered through scanty clouds in the night sky. The full moon shone above them.

No sooner had the sleigh flown into the moonlight, then the Man in the Moon's urgent voice assailed them.

"Manny, what is news?" North asked of the Moon.

"Have you seen Jack?" asked Tooth.

When Manny had spoken a few moments, Bunny held up both paws in protest. "Hang on, hang on Manny, one word at a time. _Where_ was Jack?"

When Manny had spoken a little longer, Cupcake furrowed her brow. "What are Nysiads?"

"Rain nymphs! Not the worst company for the Guardian of Fun to be in," explained North, a reminiscent twinkle in his eye, as if he had firsthand experience of the nymphs' company himself. "But is no good if he's with them no longer. Manny, you were not seeing him anywhere else after?"

The answer was a quiet, terrifying no.

"We need to go talk to them," said Tooth. "They might have at least some idea of what's going on, of where he was going."

"They live on Mount Nysa," Bunny put in. "North, are you on this?"

North swirled the snowglobe in his hand. "Ah, of course! The Nysiads, they leave an impression. I could find my way back to their home by following the sound of rain."

But the snowglobe was faster, so North threw it. They vanished through another portal.

The sleigh passed through rain clouds to come in for a landing on Mount Nysa, which told them they were in the right place. As the rain fell on their heads, Sandy conjured a massive sand umbrella and held it over Jamie and Cupcake. The sounds of giggles and hearty laughter drifted up to them through the trees.

Bunny leaned over the edge of the sleigh, smelling the wind. "Jack was definitely here," he said. "All over these mountains, actually." He paused, and sniffed the air more deeply. "Smells like a couple satyrs joined in after he left." He took another deep sniff, then looked at Tooth, eyebrows raised. "We should leave the kids in the sleigh."

"But I wanted to meet the Nysiads!" Jamie objected, as the sleigh bounced to a halt on the choppy mountain landscape. "Ow. And satyrs sound cool -"

"Maybe some other time," said Tooth, patting Jamie consolingly as she raised an eyebrow at Bunny in comprehension.

"No way," Cupcake objected, trying to climb out. "I didn't climb on Santa's sleigh to sit in it the whole time."

Tooth zipped up from her seat, plucking Cupcake up and sitting her back down with surprising strength. "Don't worry, Anansi will keep you company."

Anansi, halfway out of the sleigh, looked up. "I will?"

Cupcake and Jamie looked doubtful. "He will?"

"Do not worry," North said, as he followed Tooth, Bunny, and Sandy off the sleigh. "We promise to have no fun without you. Anansi, keep eyes on them. All eight, perhaps."

Jamie and Cupcake flopped back in their seats under the hovering dreamsand umbrella with resentful sighs. Anansi folded himself back into the sleigh, bearing his gleaming white teeth in a slow, sharp-toothed grin. "Would you children like to hear a story?"

* * *

Fortunately for the Guardians, despite the satyrs dancing and drinking in the rain, the Nysiads were just having a party rather than a_ party_. As soon as they saw the Guardians break through the underbrush the satyrs waved and the Nysiads squealed with delight.

"Northy!"

"What didja bring us?"

Pedile, Cisseis, and Arsinoe spotted Tooth and swarmed over to her with excited grins as the rest of the Nysiads crowded around North exactly like excited children at Christmas. "He brought us the Tooth Fairy!"

"You left your nest!"

"We thought you'd _never_ come party with us!"

Tooth smoothed back her feathers and smiled at the sisters. "Sorry, girls, I'm still here on business. We're looking for our friend Jack. Have you seen him?"

"Yes, is very important," North agreed. "No time for toys today, ladies, so sorry!"

The Nysiads moaned with disappointment, but composed themselves.

"He was here two days ago," said Bromia, offering a bottle to Sandy, who bowed to her politely before accepting it, as she held a hand up to keep the rain off him. "He said he was on a Spiritual Journey. He didn't tell you where he was going?"

"He didn't tell us he was going on a journey at all," said Bunny, bouncing in place with agitation as Eriphia walked up beside him. "He was supposed to meet me in Waimea, but he's gone walkabout instead-" He cut off abruptly, frozen as Eriphia reached up with a smug smile to scratch a spot on his neck. "Ah - Sheila - this is not the time -" he paused as she didn't stop, and gave in with a sigh half of resignation, half of enjoyment. "At least point us in the right direction. In minute or two."

"He didn't go in_ any_ direction," said Eriphia, adjusting her fingers slightly. "He just vanished - poof! Like through a portal."

"Only it wasn't really a 'poof,' said Coronis, "It was more an, uh - otherworldly wrenching of the fabric of space. Does that sound right?"

The other Nysiads nodded thoughtfully in agreement.

"He had this puzzle box," said Erato. "We thought of was from the Man in the Moon, but then there was that noise -"

"This puzzle box," said North, bushy eyebrows raising. "Did it look complex? Intricate?"

"Very," said Erato. "It had all these moving parts."

North nodded his head. "And when the puzzle was complete, he was sent away, as if he had been pulled through one of the portals from my snowglobes?"

The Nysiads nodded.

North paced back and forth in place, animated even in thought, his hand brushing at his bushy beard.

"There are very few who have the skill to create such a thing. That gives us a place to start."

"Is Jack in trouble?" asked Eriphia.

"He has to be." Bunny ducked (reluctantly) out from under from Eriphia's scritchy fingers. "He wouldn't break a meeting with me otherwise. North, have you got a lead?"

Ambrosia, who'd come up beside Eriphia, brought her hands to her face in glee. "You and Jack were doing a thing? Are you friends now?"

"_That's adorable,_" said Eriphia, mirroring her sister.

Bunny rolled his eyes, but it didn't mask his half-smile. "That lead, North?"

"I am having a thought. Is just a thought," said North, his brow furrowed, resting his chin on his knuckle. "But is very persistent thought. There are few who could make such a device - very few. To the sleigh!"

"Thank you so much for your help," said Tooth, as she drew away from the nymphs

"We hope Jack is okay," said Ambrosia. "Please have him come see us when you find him."

"And you should come see us sometime too," said Cisseis, mainly to Tooth, but she nodded to the rest of the Guardians. "All of you work too hard. If Jack's spiritual journey goes well, maybe he can still teach you a thing or two about relaxing when you get back."

"Here's hoping," Bunny agreed. The Guardians glanced between themselves as they made their way back to the sleigh, their worry unspoken, but clear to each other.

They arrived to find Anansi engrossed in the telling of what was apparently a very suspenseful story, by the way Cupcake and Jamie were leaning forward, silent and motionless, their mouths open with anticipation.

"- but when she pushed aside the branches, she saw only -" Anansi looked up to see the returning Guardians. "Oh look, they've returned! It seems we'll have to finish later."

The kids wailed "Nooooooo!" and Jamie flopped dramatically out of his seat.

"You can't stop there!" Cupcake howled. "Not when everything's so horrible!"

"Did they find the statue? What happens next? I'll die if I don't know!" Jamie wailed, writhing at the bottom of the sleigh.

"Of course I can stop there," Anansi said, grinning as the children loudly, wordlessly objected. "If I didn't, I couldn't enjoy these beautiful tears from my audience."

"You're evil, Spider-man," Cupcake accused. "If you don't tell us the ending, I'll make one up."

Anansi laughed out loud. "And I would love to hear it," he said, without a trace of sarcasm.

The other Guardians piled into the sleigh, Bunny taking the seat behind North.

"You didn't say what your lead was," he reminded the Cossack. "You gonna share that insight with any of us, mate?"

"There are few who could make a device such as the Nysiads said - very few," said North. He gave Bunny a meaningful look. "And there is one of those few who has no love for me," he added, and Bunny's eyes widened with recognition.

"But first, I think we stop to see one who _does_ have love for all of us," said North. He cracked the reins and sent the reindeer soaring into the sky.

* * *

There was no way to track where he'd been. It wasn't as if he had a marker on hand, after all. So, it was with great hesitance that Jack decided to mark the walls with the only thing he had available to him - his blood. Biting his finger hard enough to make it bleed was exactly as painful as he thought it would be, but the bites healed quickly and the pain was tolerable as long as he gave each finger time to let the dull ache from his self-inflicted wounds fade.

At each junction between turns of the maze, he marked one wall with a number to keep track of where he'd already been. He also smudged the pages of his book to mark the passage of time, one smudge per day. It was hard to tell without the sun to guide him, but after living over three hundred years his sense of time had gotten rather well-developed.

He was fairly sure at least a day had passed, and so far his searching had amounted to a big, ol' nothing. The passageways all looked identical, aside from his marks. If not for them, he would have thought he'd been through the same turns multiple times already.

After what felt like the millionth right turn, Jack finally walked into a room that was unlike anything he'd ever seen before. Light came from nowhere, much like it did in Bunny's warren, and like the Warren the entire area was filled with plants - but they were all made of colored glass. They scattered the light through the room in prismatic bands of color, wild conflicting splashes of light that seemed as alive as real plants.

Jack reached up to touch one, pleased as it swayed on its fragile glass stem without breaking. It was cold to the touch, like the smoothest sheet of ice. He brought his face close to it and breathed on the flower petals. Frost from his breath scattered across it in fractal patterns, even though he was completely powerless without his staff.

After hours of wandering in the dark, featureless maze, the delicate beauty of the flowers was as good as a glimpse of sunlight. Jack was caught up in enjoying it for a good moment, before it occurred to him to wonder what something lovely was doing in this maze at all.

Pitch had said there were horrors in the maze that made one wish it were empty instead. So what did that make this room of beauty?

As if reading his mind, the flowers all suddenly bent on their stems, turning to face him like so many eyes, their petals spinning, exposing razor-sharp edges.

Jack didn't wait around, no longer interested to see what the room was. He booked it through the field of flowers and reached the other side just before they exploded in a cloud of whirling razor-edged shrapnel petals.

Well, so much for a moment of soothing beauty. Jack sat against the wall to calm his frantic breathing in the nothingness of the maze as the noise of the shattering flowers died down.

He looked up briefly, and saw a mark of his own blood on the wall

"Cock and pie!"

He'd gotten turned around again. Jack rose to his feet with a groan, and trudged on. At this rate, it would take him _years_ to make any progress.

The next turn of a corner brought him into a room shelved almost to the very top of the maze - almost, but not quite enough to climb to the actual top from. That was Jack's first disappointed observation. The second was that the shelves were all full of stuff - some of it weird and unrecognizable at first glance, some of it apparently mundane - like all the nails, spoons, and single socks lying around.

"Well." Jack frowned at the stuff. "This makes perfect sense and isn't weird or seriously creepy in any way."

He hadn't forgotten the razor flowers of before, but he still had to wonder if some of the things on the shelves might be useful.

If he'd had his staff, he would have poked the nearest thing (a box, with weird symbols on it). Then again, if he had his staff, he'd have flown out of the maze hours ago.

The next best thing he could do was poke at a box, back away, poke at it again, back away, flip off its lid, back away - and so on, until he was sure it wasn't going to explode in his face. He crept over slowly after all that timid poking and peeked in. The moment he did, the contents of the box shot out, narrowly missing his face. They arced in the air above him. Jack threw himself backward and covered his face, peeking through the gap between his arms.

It was a pair of ice skates, of all things, old beat-up leather ones, child's sized and crudely stitched. They reminded Jack of the ones he and his sister had used when he was young. Far be it from doing anything dangerous, they glided and twirled overhead, as if someone was skating invisibly in the air.

Jack stayed where he sat on the ground for several minutes, waiting for them to do something dangerous, but they never did. Before long, Jack found them far too elegant to be frightening. Like the left socks and sets of keys and some of the battered toys he saw lying around, he had a feeling that the skates were certainly lost but just as certainly harmless.

"Don't suppose you know the way out, huh?" he asked of the skates, climbing to his feet. They suddenly stopped, something he took as a no, before starting up in sluggish spirals again. "Guess not or you'd be triple salchow-ing your way to freedom right now instead of hanging around with me."

The skates followed Jack in the air as he stepped forward towards the boxes again. The skates weren't exactly useful but maybe there was something in the piles of junk that could actually help him.

Jack used his tried and true poke-and-retreat method on another box before finally mustering up the courage to peek inside. This time it was a tuning fork. Curious, he reached inside and picked it up. It was strangely warm in his hands. There weren't a lot of ways he imagined a tuning fork could be helpful in escaping a maze, but he still struck it as lightly as possible on the side of the box, thinking it would be nice to hear something other than the sound of his voice.

There was no audible sound but pain exploded in Jack's head, a stabbing pain in the center of his skull so piercing it brought tears to his eyes. He dropped the tuning fork, unintentionally making it ring out again, and crumpled to the floor in a ball. Fortunately, the stabbing pain lasted for only ten seconds before fading to a dull ache.

"Not my most brilliant moment."

Jack carefully put the tuning fork back in its box and put the lid on.

A bottle on the shelf caught his eye, and he stood up to get a closer look, pressing his hand to his forehead against the dull ache lingering there. Inside the bottle was a tiny figure dressed in what looked like a fanciful Arabian costume.

It was too good to be true, but Jack still grabbed the bottle. His spark of hope all but died as he saw the little figure inside was not a living genie, but a skeleton. He opened the bottle but all that happened was that it smelled a bit musty.

On closer inspection, the tiny skeleton inside had already crumbled slightly from Jack shaking it around. He set the bottle back on the shelf with a sigh. Even if the bottle _had_ held a genie, it might have been one of the ones that killed its liberator upon gaining freedom. Anansi had told him stories. Still, it had been worth a try.

Jack poked the lid of a new box open and jumped back when a few notes of music tumbled out. He crept forward, inspecting the box more carefully. It was old, gilded and carved with elegant golden designs, obviously quite valuable. He pushed open the lid again, and more music filtered out. He left the lid open, and the music went on and on, with no signs of winding down, but that was all it did.

Jack had never heard a music box with a song that changed subtly each time it played, though. Curiously, he pulled the back of the music box off but all he saw inside were the usual parts most music boxes had. He snapped the box back together and set it back in its place.

The music was eerie, but not frightening. It was more unearthly than anything, filled with the kind of beauty that took someone far away from where they were. It sounded like like kind of music that came from places that were brighter - and older - than anything Jack had ever known.

He left it playing as he looked through the other boxes. The golden-toned music was a comfort.

The next box opened from the front, like a door. Jack pulled it open -

- and was suddenly looking out from inside the box. Yet his hand was still on the knob of the box's door. His headless body stood in front of him.

He shut the door, and suddenly he was looking at the box again, his head back in its usual place. Jack stood stock still for a moment, looked left, looked right, felt reassured that his head was still connected as it ought to be, and opened the door again. Instantly, he was inside the box, looking out at the rest of the room. The ice skates breezed merrily in front of his vision, twirling as if for his benefit.

He lifted the hand not on the tiny door's knob, and waved it through where his head normally was. His hand encountered nothing.

Jack shut the box and walked quickly away. "Worst. Box. Ever."

A sword leaned against the wall, gilded gold like the music box, and engraved with runes. It took longer than usual for the Guardians translation magic to kick in, but when it did, Jack read "Take Me Up" on the blade.

He laughed out loud. "How about no, mysterious sword?"

Then again... it was a weapon. And he was currently unarmed. He knew which side to hold, right? He'd seen North waving his swords around all the time. How hard could wielding one be?

Reluctantly, Jack stepped forward, reaching out and brushing his fingers against the hilt of the weapon. When he wasn't randomly electrocuted or set on fire, he let his fingers curl around the hilt more tightly.

He lifted up the sword to take a good look at it. The other side was engraved as well: "Cast Me Aside."

That was when he heard the whispers. They were ugly and oily and reached deep inside Jack's head to that area of his brain that itched when he was his most afraid.

_**"end it all. end it break it let it fall to dust. let the dark sweep in and devour it. the light must die. kozmotis, make them bow down in fear of us..."**_

Jack threw the sword to the ground with a loud clang. No go on that one. (Who was Kozmotis anyway?)

He lifted open the next box and saw nothing inside but a greyish layer of dust. The tiniest air currents swirled it up from its rest, and Jack watched the patterns they made.

Suddenly, the box fell apart, and dust avalanched over Jack's hands. He jumped back, shaking the dust off, but they quickly began to itch. He blew on his hands, reluctant to grind the dust in or wipe it on his sweater, but before his eyes, angry blood bruises blossomed on his hands.

"Ahh!" Jack shook his hands more vigorously. The itching went on, but the blisters stopped growing once his hands were mottled and angry-looking. He crouched in the center of the room, blowing on his hands, breathing heavily, but soon, the itching subsided. The bruises began to recede, healing at his usual accelerated rate.

It was probably about time to go - but Jack spotted another box gilded with similar carvings to the music box. He looked at this one closely, trying to decipher the pictograms on its surface. These were not words, apparently, because the Guardian magic didn't translate them, but the circular lid had notches around it, like a timer. Jack touched it, and when his hands didn't burst into flame, he tried to lift the lid. It twisted instead. He turned the lid counterclockwise, and it began to open, ticking open slowly.

The lid flew open with a flash of light and a bang like a star exploding. Jack shut his eyes in pain as a dull ringing filled his ears. He must have yelled, but couldn't hear it as he fell to the ground, away from the noise and the light.

He waited as the ringing in his ears faded slowly into silence. The pain in his eyes faded, and he opened them.

Nothing changed. He blinked his eyes, and saw only darkness.

He realized he couldn't hear the ringing anymore - but he couldn't even hear the sound of his own breathing.

He yelled. He knew he'd yelled, because he felt himself yelling, but he didn't hear it. He blinked his eyes, waved his hands in front of his face, but - nothing.

He knelt on the ground, feeling himself making noises he couldn't hear, waiting for his body to heal itself, and curling up on the ground when it didn't.

He lay that way for an hour, feeling exposed and terrified, blinking his eyes in attempt after attempt to clear them. It was only at the end of the hour that he began to see shadows in the blackness of his vision, and hear his breath as he took it in and out. Slowly, finally, his vision returned, his pulse beat in his ears, and he heard himself speaking again.

The ice skates twirled above him when he was able to see again, hovering there like they hadn't left him while he curled up senseless.

He was still trembling as he pushed himself up to lean against the wall. He rubbed at his eyes and wiped his still-wet face as he sat there, waiting for the rest of his vision and hearing to come back.

"I think, uh, I think that's enough opening boxes for today, huh?" he said shakily to the skates. "Let's save some for next Christmas."

As he stood, though, his gait was unsteady, and he knocked into one of the shelves, knocking a box from it. He yelped and jumped back, closing his eyes and covering his ears, but nothing flashed.

He caught sight of something moving in the box, though. Instead of taking a closer look, he stepped back.

"Yeah, I've had enough surprises today."

The creature inside the box thrashed, throwing the lid open, and out scurried a many-legged thing that - no, it was a pair of _hands_ sewn together. The hands reared up on one set of fingers, opening a palm in Jack's direction. An eye blinked at him in the center of the palm.

Jack stared at it, motionless, and the creature scurried away with sudden, surprising speed. Jack scurried even more quickly in the other direction, running out of the door opposite the one the sewn-together hands had run through.

The skates followed him, still doing their lazy twirls overhead. He lead them down a long corridor, wondering when they'd stop following. They never did.

"So, are you in this for the long haul, skate-buddies?" Jack asked, eyeing them. They swished side to side across his path as he kept walking it.

Well. Jack couldn't say he minded.

When he looked down from the skates, a glow up ahead caught his eye. Something shed a blue light around the next corner of the maze, a bright gleam unlike anything else that illuminated the dull maze.

Jack saw something at the corner far ahead of him. A hand, reaching around the join in the maze walls. Half a face, peeking at him, shedding that blue light.

He'd only opened his mouth to call out when the figure disappeared around the corner.

Jack bolted after it. "Hey! Hey, uh - person! You're not leading me into a trap_ too_, are you?"

He was all too keenly aware that he'd done a lot of running into traps, especially lately, so when he reached the corner of the maze, he slowed down and took it carefully.

The figure was flitting around the next corner just as Jack looked around the wall to see it. Jack caught a glimpse of a spear grasped in the running figure's hand.

He kept up the chase, taking the corners carefully, always just in time to see where the light boy had gone by a gleam at each new corner.

Finally he saw him standing still at the end of a long hallway, long enough to get a proper glimpse of him.

He was just a slip of a thing, barely substantial, like a cloud of warm breath on a cold winter day. He looked younger than Jack and was skinny in a way that almost looked alien. His clothing absolutely looked alien; his strange armor looked like it had been grown rather than made, replete with pointy shoes that gave him an elfin air. His hair was bright white and his skin glowed with a pale light like the light of the stars. The thing was most striking to Jack though was how similar the boy's face looked to his own - just different enough to make it clear they weren't the same person, but similar enough that they could've been confused for cousins, maybe. Given the boy's strange - nearly alien - form, it was clear that was just a coincidence, but it was striking in its strangeness.

Clutched in the boy's hand was a spear with a glowing blade at the end that looked more like a crystal than something made of metal, but he didn't seem to be planning on using it. His body language was far from aggressive.

In fact, on the elfin boy's face, Jack saw an expression of great sadness, sadder than he had ever seen before in his life. It didn't look like it belonged there naturally - a face like that seemed like it was more prone to laughter and joy.

"Who are you?" he asked the boy, cautiously approaching him in the hallway, his heart panging with the possibility that this boy - younger than he was - had been trapped alone in this maze, too. "Are you - are you lost, too?"

If he was, who knew how long he'd been lost?

The boy stared down the hallway, sad eyes boring into Jack like he was trying to communicate something with his gaze alone.

Then he darted around yet another corner.

"Hey! Hey, kid, wait!"

Jack ran over, turned the corner and found himself in a gilded walkway with windows that opened up to the most beautiful city he'd ever seen. Ships - flying ships like something out of a sci fi movie - shot along from place to place, gleaming silver and gold, as if they were made from parts of the finest Swiss watches. Jack could only gape in awe at the majesty of what he saw, at the massive buildings spiralling up into gold and crystal towers.

"General Pitchiner, I have the guard shifts for next week."

Jack turned and saw -

He saw something that made absolutely no sense. Two men in red and black uniforms, their armor a shining gold, walked up the walkway towards him, in lock-step.

"Thank you, Captain Breen," said a voice Jack was most used to hearing from the shadows.

Jack could only stare, slack jawed, as the two soldiers walked towards him. One of them, Jack had never seen before - a bearded man with sparkling, golden skin that reminded him of Sandman's.

The other soldier, though, was clearly, and bewilderingly, none other than -

"Pitch!"

Jack threw himself at the soldier to punch him in the face, but he passed through him like smoke - just as he'd passed through every human before he'd had believers.

So this was an illusion.

Jack stood for a moment, wondering if he should try to find his way out of the vision, or follow the two men. Ultimately, the pull of curiosity was too strong to ignore. He followed the two soldiers.

The illusion of Pitch looked...different. His skin was pale, but the normal fleshtones of a human being rather than a dreary gray. His eyes, instead of being eclipsed by a dangerous yellow color, were the only thing grey about him, but they were warm and almost...kind. His hair looked normal, instead of spiking up like he'd found some porcupine roadkill and decided it'd make a dandy hat. It was cut short, like that of military officers on Earth.

Instead of oozing everywhere he walked, he carried himself with a quiet, upright dignity that Jack never would have thought Pitch capable of.

"Very good, Captain Breen." The soldier who resembled Pitch nodded. "Make sure it's posted before the end of your shift today."

"Yessir." The golden-skinned man paused. "By the way, sir, am I supposed to curtsey now that you're a general, sir?"

Pitch seemed to be resisting the urge to grin and nearly failing at it. "A simple salute will do, Captain Breen."

"Sir, yes, sir," the soldier added, with a perfectly straight face, "Sir."

"Jem -" Pitch corrected himself. "_Captain_ - if you have any problems with protocol, you are free to voice them."

"Well, sir, it's just sir, sir sir, sir sir sir. Sir."

Now Pitch laughed, openly and freely in a way that was completely devoid of any sneering malice. It was a laugh Jack never could have imagined coming out of Pitch's mouth.

"Jem, I know it's an adjustment, but if anyone else catches us being casual, it won't reflect well on us. We have our careers to think about."

"No one will catch us being casual when it's just us, Koz. Back when you were a captain and I was a lieutenant you weren't like this unless we were deployed. Now you're a general, who says you gotta stuff your shirt up, and why are you listening to them?"

Koz? Was that short for Kozmotis? That was the name Jack had heard those frightening voices whisper when'd picked up that sword earlier.

He followed the two down several more turns, running alongside them to see their faces as they talked. They passed several strange circular devices which they put their palms on that seemed to perform some kind of scan - maybe security checkpoints? The massive, heavy doors that opened after they did it didn't seem apt to opening otherwise.

"It's different in the upper ranks. There are...expectations."

"What we really need is a good round of Moonball," said the golden, bearded soldier. Kozmotis snorted at the suggestion. "No, hear me out," he went on. "Imagine it - you're a general now, you've got general clout. You've got rank over Asmeagan, and he's more stuffed-shirted at his funnest than you are even when you try. Take that rank, and order him to let us make him eat dirt with it. Our unit, and his unit, Saturday. What do you say?"

Kozmotis waved his hand. "I'm far too busy on Saturday for such frivolities now that I've achieved rank."

"C'mon! What use is rank if you're not using it to stick old sticks in the mud, uh...in the mud?"

"I said I was busy Saturday," Kozmotis said smoothly. "What about Sunday?"

The bearded soldier laughed, clapping Kozmotis - General Pitchiner - on the back.

"See you then," the burly man said as he ducked down another hallway, report still in hand.

Pitch - Kozmotis kept walking, the slightest spring to his step as he did. As he approached another security checkpoint, this one full of heavily armed soldiers, that spring in his step faded away and was replaced with trepidation that he seemed to be trying to hide.

The soldiers at the checkpoint saluted.

"Sir. The area is secure, sir."

Kozmotis returned the salute. "At ease, soldiers. I'm here to relieve Captain Jelias and report for my shift."

There was another security check to complete here. The soldiers scanned him with handheld … somethings that weren't unlike the metal detectors at an airport.

"He's clean," said the soldier at the checkpoint. He placed his hand onto another circular device. The massive doors behind the checkpoint opened and the general strode into a cavernous room. At the end stood a massive, massive door. It was locked up with all manner of magic seals and protective sigils. They were all alien, but it was very, very clear to Jack that they were meant to keep something inside.

Standing in front of the door, keeping guard, was a female soldier. Under her helmet, her hair was blond, and a large scar twisted her lips.

"Sir," she said, saluting Kozmotis. "The gate is secure, sir. All seals have been checked for stress fractures and are intact. All fifteen containment spells have been recast as per protocol."

"At ease, Captain Jelias. You're relieved. I'll be assuming the next guard shift."

"Thank you, sir."

Kozmotis took his post at the door. The captain relaxed just slightly as she walked away, looking back at him with a lingering glance of what possibly was concern.

"They've been quiet today, sir."

"As per the usual, I expect."

"As per the usual, sir," she repeated slowly.

"I said you're relieved, Captain," Kozmotis repeated, but his voice wasn't overly harsh. In fact, he sounded as if he was trying to keep it from sounding too gentle because he knew it would be unprofessional.

"Of course, sir," the captain said. She marched out with obvious reluctance.

The massive doors shut, leaving Kozmotis alone in the room, keeping guard in front of what only could be an incredibly high-security prison.

When the silence fell, the whispers began.

_**"kooozmotiiisss."**_

It took a while for the whispers to form into voices. They were easy to mistake for ambient noises before their words became too pointed to mistake for wind from outside the walls.

_**"it will fall. it will fall into dust."**_

_**"everything will fall away into the void. even the dust will spin apart."**_

_**"and it will be you that undid them."**_

"You," the man said shakily, "are trapped - and that is where you will stay. Never to harm anyone - any child - ever again."

Yet he shook as he stood there, looking as if this was some great torment he endured on a regular basis and always dreaded going back to.

"It's over, and the worlds are safe. You're never leaving this prison."

_**"you will try to stop us."**_

_**"you will not stop us."**_

Jack could almost feel the man's emotions as he felt them. Pride seemed to be the strongest among those feelings. Pride that made him hide just how difficult this was for him - and shame at his own weakness.

Other feelings of his were far more selfless in nature. If he had difficulty enduring this, how could he force this duty on others? Only those who could endure it should have to - if he gave up his shifts, others would have to suffer through them instead.

This was simply another burden for him to _endure_.

_**"you're going to fail them all, kozmotis."**_

His fear was as sharp as the rasp of the voices on Jack's ears.

"I never have," protested the man who looked so much like Pitch, in calm, even tones betrayed only by his shaking hands. "I never will."

Just as suddenly as Jack had found himself in the strange vision, it blasted apart, dissolving into golden dust that faded away. Jack found himself in an empty room with empty gray walls, a room that looked like all the other passageways in the maze.

"What," he said to the skates, now pirouetting into view over his head, "the heck. Was _tha_t?"

* * *

The sleigh emerged over a Siberian forest, the day just breaking as North brought the reindeer lower over the stretch of evergreens. Jamie and Cupcake leaned over the side of the sleigh, gazing at the new landscape in wonder before returning to their prior activity - pestering Anansi.

"C'mon, we've got time! Keep telling the story!"

Cupcake agreed, "One more chapter! One more chapter!"

Jamie took up the chant, and Anansi sat smug and satisfied as they wore themselves out with yelling. "Maybe you should yell louder. It might magically give us time for the rest."

"C'moon, we gotta know what happens next!"

"You're gonna tell us when the sleigh lands, right?"

The Guardians laughed.

"Just one part of a story, and already you are wanting to stay in sleigh when you are in a great story yourself?" North asked of the children. "No, my little friends, storytime is all very well and good but if all you are doing is listening to the stories of others, you are not making stories of your own! As our dear friend will tell you - ah, sooner than I thought."

He nodded to a distant speck on the horizon, which resolved itself into a large bird, flying towards them. _Too_ large a bird, in fact - greater than any Jamie and Cupcake had ever seen.

Bunny, Tooth, and Sandy's worried expressions had lifted briefly. Anansi grinned hugely, steepling his fingers with eagerness.

"Who -?" Jamie asked,

"Her name is Katherine," said Anansi. "A lady of taste and talent."

"I haven't seen her in a hundred years," Tooth commented, as they drew closer to the bird, and the children realized it wasn't the bird the Guardians were talking about - it was the woman riding the bird. "She visited the Tooth Palace while chasing down some story close to my home. I wonder how much she's written since I saw her last."

Sandy nodded as they floated out of the sleigh, sand images of books and scrolls that Toothiana seemed to recognize floating over his head.

"Yes, I loved that one! I couldn't put it down! I had to get each sentence in between assignments." Tooth's smile was sheepish. "Some of the fairies got lost that day."

The bird, a giant, snow-white goose, wheeled in midair a half-mile ahead of them, flying their way as the sleigh caught up. When they'd drawn up beside the goose, the woman on its back waved to them.

"Make some room for me," she called, to the full sleigh. "I have a lot to go over."

The Guardians slid to the far side of the sleigh, and Katherine stood up on gooseback. The goose veered over the sleigh, and she leapt onto a clear seat. The goose circled overhead, and suddenly diminished in size until it was small enough to drop down into the myth lady's arms. She smoothed its feathers with an affectionate stroke, and it settled into her lap.

She was in her twenties, and wore a yellow coat. A colorful hat sat on her head, tied to it with a blue kerchief so it didn't blow off in the wind. Strapped to her waist was a curved sword, much like North's sabers, in an intricately designed golden sheath.

Her expression was stern in a way that came of constant, practiced concentration and focus rather than an ill temper, but it gave way to a broad smile as the Guardians swarmed to greet her.

"Good t'see ya again, Katherine."

"It's been too long."

A sand pictogram of a scroll being written upon, with a question mark.

"It's good to see you too, it _has_ been too long, and the writing is going just fine, thank you for asking." Katherine's face warmed with the hint of a smile. "I wish this visit was on much better circumstances than these, but it's good to see all of you again."

Anansi slid to her side, bearing his gleaming white grin. "Kaaaatherine," he said, in his smoothest-toned voice. "How long has it been? Years? Decades? Do I have a story for you."

"Might it be called 'The Frost Spirit and the Honey Tree?'" asked Katherine, giving Anansi the sort of wry expression that made her look like she ought to have a pair of reading glasses to be looking over the rims of at him. "Because I've heard it."

"What!" Anansi's composure fell. "How! Who told you that one?"

"Is that one about Jack?" Jamie's expression perked up. "It sounds like it's about Jack. Can we hear it?"

"When you're done with the other one," Cupcake put in.

"No time for stories now," said North, putting the sleigh in hover mode, and grabbing Katherine and pulling her into a massive bear-hug, goose and all. "But there is at least time for this!"

"North, I know technically I don't _need_ to breathe, but being able to would still be nice."

North released her with a laugh, clapping her on both shoulders. "Forgive me. And may I introduce Jamie and Cupcake?"

The children waved politely, Jamie's smile slightly shy, Cupcake's brazen and confident.

"Children, Katherine. She is my dear friend, who joined me on many an adventure when I was young and shall we say, more clever than wise. She was the first to believe Nicholas St. North could be more than a bandit looking for next big treasure. "

"You'd know her better as Mother Goose," Bunny put in.

The children's eyes widened with recognition.

"Keeper of stories," said Anansi. "_All_ stories," he added, smugly. "Not just the quality ones, like mine."

"Says you," Katherine said tartly. "Just because you look at a grander scope than I do, it doesn't mean the stories you know are more important than others. Which brings me to why I was leaving Santoff Claussen. I was flying to see you, North."

"What luck that I was flying to see you in the same sky!" North exclaimed. "We have problem, big big problem. Our friend, Jack -"

"He's missing," Katherine finished for him. "I know. That's why I was looking for you, North. I heard a whisper or two you might want to hear."

North leaned intently. "You have heard word?"

"I know someone who knows someone who - well, you get the idea. I have my network of contacts. I've gotten word that a goblin named Mnug was overheard bragging in a bar in El Dorado about bringing meteor ore, laced with stardust, to an enemy of yours. He said it was meant to be used for a trap for one of the Guardians. "

"Which enemy?" North asked.

"By all accounts, that's the one part Mnug hasn't bragged about but I'm thinking it's someone with an old grudge. Someone who would need that meteor to make the kind of metal you use in your snowglobes to created portals..."

North leaned back, sucking in a breath. "Just as I thought."

"From the sound of it, he was contracted out to make this...whatever it was, for someone even worse, someone whose name Mnug was too afraid to mention - someone who wanted to trap a Guardian."

"Who? Who made the thing and who's the person giving the thing to?" asked Jamie, as the Guardians exchanged knowing, concerned glances. They said nothing, and Jamie frowned. "You guys are being really heavy on the foreshadowing, just so you know."

"They probably didn't," Anansi whispered conspiratorially to Jamie.

North raised his eyebrow in what, to all appearances, was a friendly fashion. "Katherine, my dear, where might I find this Mnug?"

Katherine smiled her savvy hint of a smile.

"Naturally, he'd have left the bar in El Dorado long ago, but someone with good sources might be able to tell you he has been returning there quite regularly as of late."

North smiled his beaming smile. "And I do know someone who has very good sources."

* * *

"So then I says to 'em, I says 'Nobby ain't got nothin' on Mnug the Treacherous' and pow, right in the kisser. Went down like a sack of cats over the side of a bridge."

"Waste of good cats, that is. Good eatin'."

"S'just an expression."

The city of El Dorado gleamed with gold, as the legends said, but like every city, it had its seedy sections. The ones where the gold had become a bit tarnished. Or, to be more accurate, where any of the gold not firmly welded in place had long since been filched when nobody around was looking (and where some of the firmly welded gold had been pried away with a crowbar when nobody around was conscious).

The nameless, (nearly) goldless bar provided drink and a resting place for a lot of such filchers, one of whom had recently become quite the storyteller - to a point. Mnug was a tough nut, as mouthy goblins went. There were some heavy hitters in El Dorado's shadowy corners who had to give him credit - it took more than the usual measures to get the names of shady employers out of Mnug, for all that he bragged freely about the work he did for them.

A burly troll was about to head out through the bar door but some instinct itching in the back of his troll brain told him to wait a moment. He was the lucky one. The other two goblins near the door were not. They flew halfway across the room when the door was kicked open, partly from the force of the kick, partly because the sight of the kicker's red coat and massive boots incited them to spontaneously learn to fly, just to get away.

Every head in the room turned to the bar door and the individuals that stood there. Those that were only mildly malicious, mere ruffians a little rough around the edges, stared in open awe. Those who had performed certain deeds they wanted to hide were all consumed by the same terrified wish - 'Please let the Guardians be here for someone other than me.'

The Guardians followed Nicholas St. North in, all but one - including the Spider, a new addition to the Guardians, though rumor had it he had perhaps been working for the Man in the Moon longer than anyone could have guessed. Even the Tooth Fairy had left her palace, and judging from her expression, had come down from her mountain to unleash her wrath upon the person who'd made her come such a long way.

The Guardians were accompanied by two human children, wearing bemused expressions, fearless in this otherwise-unsavory environment.

Those patrons that had weapons, resheathed them. Those that had no sheaths quietly put their weapons down, hid their drinks, and straightened their posture.

It was in their best interests not to present a bad image for children while the Guardians and actual children were present.

Mnug the Goblin shrank in his seat, trying very hard to slide out of view and not look like he was doing it, in a bar full of carefully motionless rapscallions. But his motion only caught Nicholas St. North's eye, and the goblin froze again as North's smile blossomed across his face.

"Mnug! Good fellow! A moment of your time?"

"Yes!" squawked the harpy sitting to Mnug's left, leaping from her seat. "Yes, he is Mnug! You may talk to him! You may have my seat to do so!"

"And mine!"

"Oh, yes, mine too!"

"We're not _all_ sitting," Bunnymund cut in, in a dry voice that silenced every whisper in the room.

North, however, pulled a seat up cheerily. "Thank you, very courteous. So! Mnug. I think perhaps you have noticed - we are missing a friend. The whispers on the street, they say you perhaps can tell me where he has gone, yes?"

Mnug, whose reputation was of not giving up the goods, of being reliably tight-lipped, trembled under Santa Claus's smiling gaze, and cracked like an eggshell beneath a bowling ball.

"I don't know! I swear, I wasn't told nothin. I'm just a finder, that's all. I had no idea -"

"Ahem." Jamie had crawled up onto one of the vacated bar stools a few seats away from the bone-chilling interrogation going down. The server, and a few members of the audience, spared an eyeball or two his way. Jamie looked very serious. "The lady and I would like some hot chocolate."

"Excuse you," Cupcake said. "The lady wants a -" she hesitated, like she was trying to think of something. "- A scotch. On the rocks."

A couple of the savvier patrons looked at each other with raised eyebrows. Then they looked back at the Guardians with alarm as the mythic defenders of childhood (that weren't in the process of terrorizing a goblin while wearing an expression of benign cheerfulness) all chuckled with sudden, but genuine, amusement.

The bartender looked desperately between the two children and the Guardians, his expression torn between terror over what might happen if he gave the child what she'd asked for if he wasn't supposed to, and what might happen if he didn't give it to her and he was supposed to. He was a goblin, he didn't know what children drank. He had an inkling, though, that there were some things that they did not.

The Sandman smiled kindly, sympathetically even, at the bartender, and two mugs of hot cocoa appeared over his head as he pointed to the children.

"And maybe a fluoride water after that," put in the Tooth Fairy, with a neat little smile. "If you have it, of course."

Once upon a time the bartender had been the sort of troublemaker that knotted the manes of horses, cursed the odd traveler, and, his personal favorite, rotted people's teeth in their sleep.

The Tooth Fairy's polite, thin-lipped smile, made it clear that she was aware of this, and furthermore, aware that he was not doing this anymore and never would be again.

"I'll - I'll see what we've got in the back," he said, meekly, before scurrying away from the Tooth Fairy's piercing, panic-inducing gaze.

"You had no idea, you say?" North said, stroking his beard in thought as Mnug trembled in his seat. "Hmm, my friend, I think you might want to tell me what ideas you did have. I would be grateful. You see -"

He leaned in, as if to speak conspiratorially.

"We look for Jack Frost," he said. "He is new Guardian, perhaps you had not heard?"

"I heard," said Mnug, in a tiny voice stretched as thin as a violin wire. "We - we all heard."

They'd heard amazing things. They'd heard that Jack Frost had taken Pitch down at the height of his power, with no more than a snowball to the head. They'd heard that Jack Frost had laughed in Old Man Winter's face and undone his work, when so many older myths than he had been devoured by the old incarnation of winter. It was said, too, that Jack Frost's presence had stayed Bunnymund's hand, when he had the chance to end the life of the being that had destroyed his home and left him bereft of kith and kin.

Old Man Winter had still died of course, but the point was that he had not died at the hand of the Guardian who had every right to end his life. And the Guardian said to be responsible for that mercy was missing.

And Mnug the Goblin had been bragging that he'd had a hand in procuring things meant to trap a Guardian.

Every eye in the room was narrowed at the goblin, as they realized that the Guardian he'd helped trap was the only Guardian who hadn't already beaten anyone present in the room to a bloody pulp.

"We're all fond of him," North went on.

"Very fond," put in Bunnymund.

"_Deeply_ so," added the Tooth Fairy.

"So if someone has taken him - I am inviting you to consider: you know what we Guardians do for the people we love. You do know what we will do, don't you, Mnug?" North's smile took on a hint of concern, as if over the notion that Mnug might_ not_ be aware what the Guardians would do for the sake of those they loved.

"I know," said Mnug, in the same thin voice.

"So I think, say you are knowing a thing or two." North shrugged. "I think you will be understanding and share your knowledge with us."

The bartender returned, sliding three mugs of piping hot cocoa onto the bartop. Cupcake looked a little disappointed, though not surprised, and she and Jamie reached for theirs.

"Hold on," Bunnymund warned them, loping to the bar and flaring his nostrils wide as he took a deep sniff of the steam from all three drinks. He looked up, considering the scent, his steely glare locked on the barkeep.

The entire room held their breath until Bunnymund said, "They're clean. Go for it, kids."

Only then did North, too, pick up the cocoa he hadn't even bothered to ask for.

He took time to enjoy it as he drank it. That seemed to be the final straw for Mnug: North casually taking time to enjoy his cocoa.

"Okay, okay, I give!" said Mnug frantically. "I was hired by Krampus. He needed someone to get meteor ore, laced with stardust, said he was using it to trap a Guardian. Someone hired him to make it for them."

North finished his long sip of cocoa, smacked his lips, then said, "Who? Did he say who hired him?"

"I don't know! He didn't say."

North took another sip of cocoa. The goblin cringed.

"I swear he didn't say! It was a major player, though, someone he didn't want to make angry."

"It's probably Pitch again," said Jamie, completely oblivious to his cocoa mustache. "That's okay, I brought the boot I threw at him last time."

"When did you have time to get your throwing boot?" Cupcake asked.

"I keep it in my backpack, just in case." Jamie took another sip of cocoa. "I'm trying to be more prepared."

All the monsters and mischief-makers in the room stared at the boy wide-eyed, their minds all blown by the idea of a kid that knew Pitch Black and wasn't terrified of him.

"I'm sure," North said to Mnug, "that if you were to know where Krampus would be found that you'd have already told me, yes?"

"I don't know where he is. He had me do the drop-off but it's not like he invited me to his home for tea and krumpets. That's everything I know, I swear!"

At that, North reached out and...patted the goblin on the shoulder.

"Your help, it is greatly appreciated." He reached into his coat and pulled out a very menacing … candy cane. "Candy cane?"

The goblin looked terrified to say no, but equally terrified to eat it. Ultimately fear of North himself wore out over any fear of the candy cane being harmful and the little goblin started gnawing away.

"Enjoy," said North, and the merriment in his voice was...so infectiously genuine. "Keep up good work, Mnug. Except maybe less good work for enemies of the Guardians, yes? Is still room enough in this world for small kindnesses."

Small kindnesses...perhaps like the way North was getting up and leaving the bar without putting his boot in Mnug's face.

Between that and the fact that it really was a very good candy cane, Mnug was seriously considering giving up a life of crime.

* * *

"For monsters, those guys were pretty helpful," said Jamie, as the Guardians returned to the sleigh and the stamping reindeer, which the passing pedestrian myths gave a wide berth.

"Needed to work on their cocoa, though," said Cupcake. "It was kinda bitter."

"Yes," said North, "But they tried so hard. It was kind not to hurt their feelings."

"You know they're probably gonna shut that place down now, don't you?" said Bunny, with a slight chuckle. "Now that they know we know we know where it is."

"Eh." North shrugged. "The thieves and the scoundrels, they will find a new place to congregate. Don't they always?"

He and Bunny exchanged a look that suggested knowing a bit about congregating with thieves and scoundrels, and chuckled.

Behind them, the thieves and scoundrels fled from every door and window of the nameless bar, now a nameless abandoned building as the Guardians flew away from it.

* * *

"Huey, Louie, this way," Jack said, marking another juncture, shaking the sting out of his hand as the skin started to heal over yet again. "I think I found a way forward."

So far, judging from the marks he'd left himself, he'd recently been turned around at least five times. But now he was almost certain he'd found the right path to keep from going in circles yet again. This place...looked new. It was a long hallway, with an actual ceiling, but it was arched terribly high above, painted in a strange smear of colors that didn't seem to have any form or substance to their design.

"Looks like somebody went a little crazy with the fingerpaints, huh guys?" he said to the skates.

They stopped in the air and tilted, as if looking upward.

Jack looked down again to watch where he was going. The floor was...strange here. It was all one massive, flat pane of smooth black stone, shiny and polished, like glass or the surface of water.

It seemed steady enough to walk on though, so Jack traipsed along carefully, his eyes drawn back to the ceiling again.

The longer he looked, the more it seemed as if the colors were moving, blending together in strange shifting shapes.

"Can't say I think it looks that good. Jackson Pollack was never really my kind of -"

A sound like the cracking of ice rang out. Jack's heart clenched in his chest as the floor fell out from under him.

He dropped into black water that obliterated his view of the surface. The water - no, this wasn't water at all. Water wasn't this dark. It wasn't this thick. Water wasn't this cold, even in the Antarctic, so cold that it brought Jack back to his last few moments of mortal consciousness under the ice of the pond three hundred years ago.

Jack clawed his way to the surface and gasped in ragged lungfuls of air, reaching blindly for something to float on. Even three hundred years after his death, his dread of water had kept him from learning to swim. He'd have been out of luck in this case, even if he had - no sooner had he touched the edge of the intact floor when _something_ under the water grabbed him and pulled him down. His skin burned at the_ thing's_ contact. The not-water muffled his scream.

More things latched onto his ankles, stinging his skin like nettles. Jack clawed for the edge again, but the grasping hands yanked him under with only half a breath in his lungs.

He clawed his way nearly to freedom and was dragged away from it time and again, until his whole world was fear and the ache of his lungs. Adrenaline burned in his limbs as with a wild flail he finally kicked himself free and launched himself over the broken edge, heaving himself onto the intact floor. He scrambled away from the edge, trailing a streak of black inklike liquid. The water dripped from him, clear until it pooled on the floor. When he'd distanced himself from the edge, he stood and ran.

The floor groaned under his feet the minute he stood, cracking and giving way behind him. He picked up speed but the cracks raced ahead of him as he ran, and the floor broke apart. Jack's agility was all that saved him, given that much of it had less to do with his powers and more to do with 300 years of climbing on things. He darted nimbly from one stable patch of floor to the other, barely stumbling where others would have fallen.

The last few yards of floor still cracked under him, until Jack had nothing solid left to push off of but the wall. He kicked off the wall opposite to where he intended to land and threw himself, finally safe, into a new hallway. The floor held, solid and stone again underneath him, like the rest of the floor in the rest of the maze.

Jack didn't stop. He picked himself up and ran, on and on until his legs ached and his lungs ached even worse. He finally collapsed against a wall when sheer exhaustion stopped him from running any farther.

He coughed, his throat still raw from the near-drowning, and leaned his head against the wall. He tried to breathe, hating that he still felt like he couldn't, even now that the danger was gone. He didn't bother pushing his damp hair out of his eyes. Through the strands, he saw the skates twirling pensively nearby, trembling with agitation just as Jack was.

Except that it wasn't agitation Jack felt. It was fear that ran deep down into his bones.

If he didn't get out of the maze soon, if the others didn't find him and he couldn't find his way out, he was going to suffer. That much he knew.

"Boy, a rescue sure would be nice right about now," he murmured, the lighthearted words betrayed by the quiver in his voice. "Before there's no me left to rescue."


	3. Chapter 3

**Author's Note:** Sorry for the long delay, folks. This was a very busy summer. Things have finally died down for us a bit now that it's over.

Kate and I will be co-writing an original book together and are working on our own individual books and I just want to periodically make note of that and see if anyone would be interested in being on our mailing list to be notified when we self-publish. If you would be, just pop an email to kirajlane at gmail DOT com to be added to the list. We'll only contact you for major information in the future, like release dates. If you like our fic, our original stuff - which is in the vein of things like HTTYD, RoTG, and Discworld - will be right up your alley.

* * *

**The Boy Who Found Fear At Last**

by Kira, Kate, and Kaylin

* * *

**Chapter 3**

"How many has he had so far?"

"I - I don't _know_."

"Torg's never going to win. Not against_ him_. Why did he even agree to the contest anyhow?"

"He just came out of nowhere and challenged him. You know Torg, he doesn't ever back down from a challenge."

"Gotta give 'im credit for trying. I'll miss him when his livers kick out."

The bystanders in the Prancing Pegasus, one of the most popular bars in El Dorado, were well used to watching the occasional drinking contest, but this one was record-breaking - both in terms of how many drinks had been consumed and how legendary the drinkers were.

Rumor had it that Torg the troll hadn't lost a drinking contest in five hundred consecutive years, despite competing against thousands of worthy opponents, including, allegedly, Tezcatzontecatl, one of the four hundred drunken rabbits known as the Centzon Totochtin.

He had not, however, ever competed against the living legend that was Nicholas St. North.

Which mean he'd also certainly never competed against him when he was trying to get information that would allow him to find someone that he cared for greatly.

"Ha!" North laughed after he downed yet another shot, wobbling slightly in place. That would have been a sign to worry the Guardians, if Torg had not already been leaning heavily on the tabletop. "I am thinking - I am thinking that this may as well be water. This is what I'm thinking."

"Blugrhfsdsddfafa."

"What's that?" asked North, holding an unsteady hand to his ear. "Is that the sound of defeat coming out of your mouth?"

"Asafsdsadasafasdsa."

It sure wasn't the sound of coherent sentences. Torg was far beyond those now.

He still made a game attempt at downing his shot. It almost made it into his mouth instead of all over his shirt. Almost. Just like he almost flopped into his chair instead of landing heavily on the floor. Sandy peered over him thoughtfully, then gestured Anansi closer. The Spider prodded the downed troll with one dark leg, then nodded once to the Sandman. Both turned and gave the Cossack thumbs up.

"Ha!" North crowed. "A winner is me! Shostakovich -"

He wove so widely that Tooth jerked to the side, and Bunny braced to catch North if he collapsed. But his eyes stayed open, and he waved off his compatriots' worried looks as he wobbled back upright in his chair.

"The winner will have cocoa now," said North waving now to the barkeep. "The loser will have cocoa as well, but, shall we say, a _special_ blend."

He briefly failed to dig into the pocket of his massive coat, but finally succeeded in extracting a little pouch. He held it out to the waiter, who made the error of taking a deep sniff from the pouch upon receipt. He nearly fell back himself, steadying himself against the bar as he handed it to the tender.

"Do you think it's the cocoa that gives him all that fortitude?" Cupcake whispered to Jamie. Jamie shook his head.

"He only has cocoa afterward," he said. "I think it's probably the milk. He drinks a lot of milk on Christmas."

"I guess," Cupcake answered as Sandy picked up one of the remaining filled shot glasses, sniffed it curiously, and took a sip.

He immediately passed the less-one-sip shot to Anansi, thumping his chest with a fist, coughing up a little cloud of dreamsand. Anansi, a little less curious than the golden man, grinned and held the glass out to Bunny.

"What do you say, old friend?" he asked, teeth flashing white against his dark skin. "I bet it would-"

"If you say '_put hair on your chest_,' you'll be wearing it," Bunny answered. Jamie and Cupcake (and the rest of their audience) tittered, and still-grinning, Anansi set the shot back down on the table. North picked it up and wagged a finger at Jamie and Cupcake.

"I do not want to hear either of you trying this for ten years," he said sternly. "Naughty List. I am watching."

"Yes, North," said Jamie

"Yes, Santa," said Cupcake.

"Naughty List," the Cossack repeated, setting the glass down again firmly on the tabletop to punctuate his sentence. "Also, unsavory sorts may attempt to take advantage. Drink with friends, or with friends nearby. Yes?"

"Yes, North."

"Yes, Santa."

The waiter returned, placing a mug of hot cocoa in front of North and dispatching another to one of Torg's friends. It took three people in total to sit Torg up enough for the waiter to pour a little sip of the special cocoa into the troll's mouth.

A little bit went a long way apparently, because Torg's eyes popped open wide, his face turned red, and he sat up with a noise that sounded a little bit like:

"HHHHHWWWWOOOOOOOOARGH!"

"Glad to have you back with us," said North, genial and starting to sober. "Come, sit. Now that I've won your wager, we have much to talk about. "

Torg shook as he got to his feet, swaying a bit before slumping into his chair. Despite losing, he looked incredibly impressed. He even laughed a hearty laugh at the sight of North sitting there calmly drinking his cocoa.

"Well done, old man! No one's beat me in over five hundred years!" crowed Torg. "Fair's fair, you bested me. What exactly did you need to know?"

"There is someone I am looking for. I am told you have many friends, Torg - friends that might be able to tell me where this person is."

"Krampus," Torg ground out between jagged teeth. His tone of voice showed he had no love for the myth, but that hadn't been enough for Torg to roll on him. Information was something he only gave to those he respected and respect had to be earned. "I know someone who would know where he is, but it'll be dangerous for you to talk to her. I can tell you where to find her, though."

North sat forward in his chair. "Your help would be _most_ appreciated."

* * *

Jack rounded a corner and found himself in space. He had only a second to recognize that he was floating among the stars before something bright gold streaked past his face and dragged him into its wake.

"Ahh!"

Jack flailed to right himself as he slipped along behind the - it looked like a comet, but less like the comets kids learned about in school, the frozen rocks with vaporizing ice tails, and more like a comet a kid might draw with their crayons - a gleaming golden pod with soft, rounded edges, trailing golden dust as it flew through space. The sight of the golden dust was heart-stoppingly familiar.

Jack twisted to see through one of the gold-dusted windows.

"...Sandy?"

The figure inside moved too frantically for Jack to see him clearly, but there was no mistaking that little sand-drop silhouette. Even though Jack knew he was only seeing an illusion, his heart still leapt hopefully at the sight of the Sandman.

Cruising through space. That was...unexpected.

And the spaceship wasn't following an easy, dreamy path like Jack might have expected, either. It hurtled along through the stars with Sandy moving with harried efficiency at the helm, pulling Jack along in a zigzag wake. Jack soon saw why - bursts of nothingness streaked past, blotting out the stars, narrowly glancing off the ship's gold-dust shield as Sandy dodged them.

One finally struck, cracking through the golden halo that surrounded the ship. It veered wildly, and bent its trajectory towards a mottled blue-and-white planet looming in the sky ahead.

The veering of the ship spun Jack around so that he got a full view of the formless blackness chasing Sandy's starship. Blobs of it lashed out at the ship, narrowly missing, and eerie blobs of dirty yellow light flashed in it, as if through thick smog.

Jack looked over his shoulder. The blue planet had loomed large into view, and he realized both the ship and the black mass - and he, as well - were going to crash into it.

"Ahh!" Jack flailed uselessly, which only sent him ping-ponging into the interior of the ship's shields and then back.

"Oof!"

He managed to hook a hand onto one of the fins of the ship and held on for dear life.

The starship skidded to a crunchy-sounding stop across the surface of the rugged planet, carving a long path through the dense trees where it landed, flinging Jack free so that he skidded to a stop and landed in a giant mud puddle. The blobby fear-mass didn't carve a path - it smashed a crater into the Earth, flattening the trees and almost burying Jack in a slurry of wood and mud. Clambering to safety himself, Jack caught sight of Sandy emerging from the broken ship, and the two of them both looked back towards the crater.

For all that his ship had crashed, Sandy looked only slightly alarmed as a tall figure raised itself from the smoke of the crater and stalked his way with his yellow-tinged eyes flashing. He glanced around the half-destroyed forest, bouncing slightly in place as he swept up a sand cloud to spirit himself away.

The shadowy figure jolted into pursuit, leaving traces of itself in its trail as if it were cutting the air open to bleed around it. The shifting nightmare smoke peeled off Pitch Black's skin as he pursued the Sandman across a vast and primeval forest. Jack found himself carried along after them through the air, as if tugged by an invisible rope, across the forest which was so large, there was something primordial about it. The air around him felt different, too - cleaner than any air he'd ever smelled, as if the forest - and the world - were still new.

Sandy looked over his shoulder, his cheery brow furrowed with consternation as he saw Pitch in pursuit. He picked up the pace, but so did Pitch, closing the distance between them. Mountains loomed in the distance, at the edge of the forest, and Sandy zipped up and over a fork between them. They dodged mountains like pinballs, trailing sand and pure fear through the range, until the ground beneath them opened up into a wide grassland. Sandy suddenly stopped running.

The look in his eyes made Pitch skid to a halt in mid-air, even before his first lash from the sandwhip.

The king of nightmares tried to fight back with his mass of fearful smoke, but it was blowing away in the wind that shook the grass, while Sandy's mass of dreamsand maintained its volume. The boiling essence of fear around Pitch took rudimentary shapes, but only with extreme effort on Pitch's part, and not even fast enough to fully form before Sandy struck them down. Pitch hadn't mastered his powers, yet - and he didn't have the nightmare sand to call on. Even Sandy's sandforms seemed strangely loose, compared to the shapes Jack knew him for creating with them - as if this fight had taken place so long ago that even Sandy was still a few tricks shy of mastering his sand.

But he was more than a master enough for Pitch. His final lash threw the not-yet-Nightmare-king against the side of the mountain, then, for good measure, he threw Pitch into the air and yanked him back down on a strand of glittering sand. Pitch's impact left another crater, and the last of the fear essence blew away on the wind as he lay, dazed.

And just like that, the battle was over. Jack wondered why Sandy had even been running from Pitch at all.

The little sandman dusted his hands off as he landed at the side of the crater. He looked at Pitch, shaking his head with an expression that said the Nightmare King should have known better.

"He really should have," Jack agreed, with a short laugh, but Sandy didn't hear him.

Sandy lifted his finger to as if address Pitch, a very measured, calm gesture. The Nightmare King groaned, stirred, then stilled again. Sandy waited until he opened his eyes again and, when he was sure he had Pitch's attention, he opened his mouth and shocked Jack nearly out of his skin.

"Stop following me," he said in a voice that was calm and sonorous and strangely deep.

It was all he said before nodding and floating away from the stunned Pitch, back toward the wreckage of his ship.

Jack had been crouching on a tree branch nearby as he watched the fight, but the sound of Sandy's voice had him slipping off in surprise, clinging to it again only just before he fell. It felt almost...sacrilegious. Whatever reasons had driven Sandy to endless silence had to have been personal and meaningful and it felt wrong for Jack to hear his voice without his permission.

Pitch, bewildered, waited until Sandy was gone to rise from his crater and put a spindly hand to his head. Jack watched him crawl out, following Sandy's golden trail back to the wreckage of the spaceship. Sandy was picking through the ship when Pitch arrived, tossing parts aside, the concern on his face still mild, even though he clearly was not salvaging anything from the wreck. Pitch slunk through the shadows, his yellowed eyes glittering with malice, his ragged-nailed fingers curved into grasping claws as he slipped down a long shadow cast by a tree behind Sandy -

At the very last minute, the Sandman turned around and walloped his would-be throttler in the gut with a sandblast that glittered in the light of the setting sun. Pitch slammed against a treetrunk and sank to the ground with a groan. Sandy hovered in front of him, a little more frustrated.

"What did I say?" he asked. His hands were spread, his eyebrows raised in an expression of disbelief at Pitch's raw determination to get his butt kicked. It was all he said before going back to his salvage.

The vision went on, through scene after scene of Pitch and Sandy cohabitating on the strangely empty Earth, Sandy salvaging from materials in his spaceship a little home in the clouds, while Pitch ever slunk at the edges of the light.

"This is about fear, isn't it," Jack said, finally. He said it mostly to himself, but maybe partly to the ice skates.

"Well I mean, obviously the whole maze is - but this isn't _my_ fear." He gestured to the vision - where Pitch had provoked an almost exasperated Sandy into yet another curbstomping. "I don't know how Pitch's memories are in here, but this is somehow about his fear, too."

Maybe the key to his salvation was figuring out _why_.

* * *

Sometimes, a door would slam shut behind Jack.

This was curious, because there were no doors on any of the openings when he walked through them. Nevertheless, sometimes he would walk through an opening, and hear a door slam shut behind him before he'd even had time to turn around and see it appear.

The room was always the same. It massed with colored lights, like rainbow fireflies buzzing in place. At first, Jack had been wary of them, remembering the room of razor glass flowers, but the lights never harmed him. They never did anything but be beautiful.

Jack had realized this by the time he'd reached the room a third time, after witnessing Sandy and Pitch's crash-landing on Earth. Now, the sound of the door slamming shut behind him was almost a comfort - it meant, if he was right, something pretty that didn't want to hurt him. The ice skates spun over his head as he slid down the door, resting for a moment as the lights gleamed above him.

He reached out to touch one, and it vibrated softly and floated away, powered along by his touch, like it was floating through airless space. It bounced against another light, and the motion transferred, the first rebounding off the second, sending it spinning slowly through the room. If Jack stayed, perhaps soon the whole room would be alive with gentle motion.

He was tired. Tired of walking, of seeing things he knew were not his to see, tired of seeing nothing that was beautiful. So he did stay until then - just waiting, getting his strength back, as the lights danced.

The door always slammed behind him when he entered the room and he knew it would slam behind him again when he left. But somehow, he always found it again.

He didn't know which to care about more - this sign that he was going in circles, or this reassurance that there was still something, even if it was just one thing, in the maze that wouldn't do anything but soothe him.

When he couldn't justify sitting and enjoying the lights any longer (sitting peacefully was a relief, but it also wasn't going to get him out of the maze), he finally moved on through the room, sighing as the door slammed shut behind him. The clang of its closing was loud, and it echoed off the scene laid before Jack.

He stood in a desert, stretching out as far as the eye could see. The flat plain around him was spiked thickly with dead trees, but in the distance, the sands rose up into endless dunes, as bright and pale as snow banks. The dead trees looked like they'd been scorched by fire, but Jack couldn't see how they'd still be standing if they'd been burned by anything fiercer than the light of the sun.

Jack turned around to look for the door only to find that it was gone. All he saw behind him were more dunes. He turned back to the macabre grove in front of him.

"This isn't ominous at all," he said to Huey and Louie, who looked almost timid as they floated overhead.

Jack took a few cautious steps towards the trees, stopping as a crackling noise and a rush of hot air hit him. The trees were suddenly all on fire.

Jack stopped, his jaw hanging open for a moment. "Oh, no thank you," he said, turning problem to walk across the sand dunes directly behind him. He was going around this big creepy flaming forest of dead trees, thanks.

Jack trudged unsteadily over several dunes before climbing over the last to find...

The flaming forest spread out in front of him again. He rolled his eyes skyward and without a word, trudged off to the right this time, hoping to go around the dunes, but after climbing over a particularly steep one -

The flaming forest was there again, waiting for him down below in all its sinister glory.

Jack pressed his fingertips to the bridge of his nose.

"Of course I have to walk through the sinister, flaming forest of dead trees. Why did I expect anything different?" he asked the skates.

They both bobbed in the air in a movement that resembled a shrug.

Jack tilted his shoulders back, took a deep breath and walked towards the flaming forest. Even though every instinct told him to run, he didn't. He'd learned through experience that running wasn't always the best move in the maze. Sometimes the movement only caught the attention of things that liked the chase.

He took his steps slowly, his toes sinking into the hot sand, watching the flaming trees closely. They did nothing but burn, making odd, groaning sounds as he walked. That didn't reassure him. He wasn't going to be reassured until he was through the flaming forest.

Actually, he probably wasn't going to be reassured until he was out of the maze altogether.

The trees groaned even louder as they burned and suddenly, one exploded. Bright fragments of wood shot in all directions, just barely missing Jack. The rest of the trees began to groan louder as Jack yelped and cowered.

Okay, so this wasn't one of the situations where running was bad. Running was good here, running was definitely good.

Jack broke into a sprint, hopping over the flaming remains of the tree in the sand. All around him, the trees started exploding, sending flaming splinters and bits of wood in every direction. For the most part, the explosions caused a bunch of narrow misses, but one of them sent a huge chunk of flaming wood right at his head. Before he could even think about dodging, the skates darted in and knocked it out of the air.

Finally, he was through. After climbing over the dunes on the other side of the flaming forest, he saw a tunnel that led down into a place that seemed filled with the same kind of stone of the rest of the maze and he bolted down out of the heat, away from the terrifying, flaming explosions.

Jack sank down to sit with his back against a stone wall, taking respite in the blissful cool. The skates were still with him, though now they were smudged with soot and looking just a little scorched.

"Thanks, guys," Jack panted out, looking up at them gratefully.

There was no reason for them to have done that. If they were just enchanted things meant to be pretty, why would they have the means to act on his behalf? Maybe they were sentient somehow. Maybe there was some invisible spirit guiding them along.

Whatever the case, one thing Jack knew for sure was that if - _when_ he got out of here, he was making sure Huey and Louie got out, too.

* * *

Another number on the maze wall, another fingerprint in the book. The walk through the maze had been dark and quiet for a while. No rooms with menacing things, nothing exploding in his face, not even the room of glowing lights.

Jack was glad to have not run into anything menacing in a while, but the quiet was still unnerving. He was that much more relieved when he turned a corner and saw a now-familiar glowing figure ahead.

The strange starlit boy was there again, balancing on the handle of his spear. The point was stuck in the cracks between two stone tiles on the floor. It was strange to see the boy balancing, looking almost happy as he wobbled there on one foot. It was the same sort of thing Jack did with his staff during periods of boredom.

Jack approached quietly, hoping that he'd manage to keep the boy still long enough to talk to him. He was willing to grab him this time if he had to, but the boy shook his head as if to say, 'I know what you're thinking, and don't even think about it.' His eyes were filled with something that might have been pity.

Pity for who? Him, in the maze? Or pity for what he was about to show Jack next?

"These things you've shown me...about Pitch," Jack asked quietly. "What do they mean? Why are they here? And who are you?"

The boy shook his head again, as if in great sadness. The pity must have been for Jack, he realized. He had to be a sight just then, his clothes ragged and torn by the exploding trees, face smudged with dust and dirt.

"Are you lost like I am?" Jack asked. The boy simply shook his head, flipped off of the end of his spear, and landed lightly on his feet. He pulled it out of the floor and ran, looking back as if he wanted Jack to follow.

Jack ran like he always did, wondering why, despite not knowing who the boy was, despite not knowing if he was a threat or lost like he was, it always seemed to feel like they were playing a game of tag together. He turned a corner and found himself under a beautiful night sky. The boy wasn't there anymore.

Jack knew somehow that the sky he was looking at wasn't Earth's sky. It was tinged purple and the stars were thicker. They glowed brighter than Jack had ever seen them anywhere in the world, even before electric light had polluted the sky.

Looking around him only confirmed the other-ness of this place. The trees were a strange blue color, and they twisted in looping shapes that no Earth trees ever had. The grass was tinged with a pink so bright it was visible in the starlight and in the light of the strange glowing lanterns that had been set around the camp.

Jack was fairly certain it was a camp, at least. A military camp, maybe - there were tents and guards and people in uniforms nearly the same as the ones General Kozmotis and his friend had worn. Filled with curiosity that burned in a way that was nearly physical, Jack moved around the camp, searching for...

"Koz! Hey, Koz! How's the kid?"

Jack saw the soldier from before, Kozmotis Pitchiner's friend. He was younger now, and his gold-toned face was a lot less cheerful in this memory.

Kozmotis was younger, too. Eerily so - he couldn't have been ten years older than Jack. Jack didn't know what to make of his expression, weary in a way that rang deeply familiar to him. There had been times growing up, he remembered, when his mother's face had been lined with such deep concern, usually when she was worried about keeping him and his sister fed. It was the expression adults got when they worried deeply about children.

"Not...well," Kozmotis said ruefully. "Jem, he's not talking. They brought him in, fixed him up, and he hasn't said a word."

"Well, you know the Star Herders. Their vocal cords have a bit of trouble with Common. He can probably understand it."

"That's not it," said Kozmotis. This time he seemed far less concerned with formality, though that may have had to do with the fact that he had fewer little pins in his collar and bars on his chest. "After everything he saw... I can certainly imagine what it must have been like - we've been in the thick of it ourselves, but he's hardly more than a child, even by Star Herder standards. I'm not sure he's entirely...there."

The tone of Kozmotis' voice sounded absolutely mismatched with Pitch's. It rang with deep compassion and concern, a tone like North might use when talking about a child in need.

"Maybe you should try to talk to him," Jem suggested.

"Me?"

"You're the one who already has a kid."

Jack sucked in a breath so suddenly he choked on his own spit. He coughed so much he almost missed Kozmotis' response.

"Yes, but Rashena is Rashena. I don't have to know how to talk to her. She'll talk _at_ me no matter the situation. Pretty much incessantly. About every possible subject, from why the sky is indigo to whether or not moondogs can look up." Though his words were wry, they were filled with a great deal of affection. "It's really rather easy - I just have to _sit_ there. This is a _very_ different. What he needs is a counselor or a grief specialist -"

"And we don't have one currently detached with us," Jem pointed out. "C'mon, Koz, the kid needs somebody to talk to him. It needs to be someone patient and kind, someone that can pull off parental."

Kozmotis sighed and looked towards the opening of one of the tents. "I suppose he does."

He stepped into the tent. Jack followed close behind him. It was a large tent, clearly meant to be used for medical purposes or for refugees of some kind. There were cots and blankets and little lanterns like the ones outside.

There was only one figure in the room, though, sitting alone on a cot, a blanket wrapped haphazardly around his shoulders. His spear leaned against the side of the cot.

Jack inhaled sharply, but managed not to choke this time.

It was the boy who glowed like starlight. His eyes were blank and distant, and though the blanket had slid down his shoulders, he didn't seem to notice.

Kozmotis stepped towards him slowly, trying to act non-threatening. His hands clenched and unclenched awkwardly at his sides. He was silent for a while, as if considering several things he might say.

Finally, when Kozmotis spoke, it was with a simple, "I can't imagine what you're going through right now, so I'm not going to pretend that I understand. I've lost loved ones and friends to the fearlings, but not -"

He broke off.

"I just want you to know that despite how it may feel at the moment, you're not alone." He took a seat on the cot opposite the glowing boy. "We came here to help you and your people and we're going to make sure that you're taken care of."

The glowing boy still stared into the distance, completely unresponsive.

"My name is Kozmotis. Kozmotis Pitchiner," Koz went on. "What's yours?"

The boy sat in silence. It seemed it would continue on, but he finally looked over at Kozmotis.

Then he spoke, presumably saying his name. Jack couldn't understand it at all, it sounded as if it had a few hard consonants in it that were familiar, but otherwise, the noises that came from star-boy's mouth were too resonate and musical to sound like spoken language. If the stars could laugh, that beautiful noise would have sounded like the boy's name.

"...I'm afraid I'm going to have a bit of difficulty pronouncing that," Kozmotis said awkwardly. "I hope you understand."

Koz's befuddled apology made star-boy's mouth twitch just slightly in amusement, but the expression quickly faded.

Kozmotis reached inside a pouch in his belt and pulled out a very space-age, magical...pen and paper. Jack had been expecting something slightly more sci fi. "You can understand Common, yes? Can you write it?"

The boy nodded and took the pen and paper and scribbled something on the page.

**You Coreworlders can't enunciate to save your lives.**

Kozmotis moved over to sit next to the boy so he could read what he was writing more easily. Jack followed, looking over both their shoulders. When Kozmotis saw what the boy wrote, he laughed.

"I suppose in comparison to you, everything I say sounds like mush."

The boy nodded once then resumed staring off into space again.

Kozmotis sat in silence for just a little while, and then finally said, "You are a remarkable young man, you know. When we found you, the spirit you showed, after everything -"

The boy started scribbling words frantically.

**Not special. Lucky. I was lucky, that's all. I got to the light caves, no one else managed to. **

"I didn't mean -" Kozmotis inhaled deeply, trying to figure out what he meant. "What I mean to say is that I've known of people that faced that kind of darkness and simply waited to die. We saw the dead fearlings on the way to the caves. We saw that there'd been a fight. If that was you..."

The boy scrawled out: **Some of us were outside the village when they came. We saw that the village was surrounded. I was the oldest. I tried to get the younger ones to the caves. **

The next words were almost carved into the paper.

**I failed.**

"I've failed before, you know. I'm a captain of the Great Golden Army and I've failed many people before. No one is perfect, no one can win every battle."

The boy scribbled: **I couldn't protect my sister.**

Jack's heart clenched in his chest and memories of the sound of ice cracking under a little girl's feet almost drowned out Kozmotis' response.

"And I couldn't protect my wife," the captain said quietly, looking at the boy. "What matters is that you did all that you could. That's all anyone could have asked of you. That's all you could have asked of yourself."

**What good is that? I tried to save them, I tried to lead them, but I made a mess of everything. I did everything wrong.**

"All we can do is try our best and if we fail, hope against hope that the people who were lost were at least comforted by the knowledge that someone cared enough to try to help them. I know that sounds like a very thin comfort, but one the other things we have are those who are still living. In dark times like these, we still have each other, all of us that stand opposed to them, all of those who try to protect one another. I know your people put a lot of stock in that, in interconnectedness, and - and community and the rest of us don't feel any differently. There are so many people that are here for you now and we are going to take care of you."

The boy's shoulders started to shake and the noises he made that were his version of sobs made Jack feel as if he was being stabbed right between the ribs. The sound of the sobs obliterated every other idea in his head and left him with a single, nearly nonsensical thought:

That stars shouldn't weep.

The boy scribbled onto the paper and his words were blurred by the tears that fell on the page.

**What's going to happen to me now?**

"I'm not sure where you'll go, but if you're willing to come with us, I promise you we'll find someplace where you're cared for. We won't leave you here alone."

The boy leaned into Kozmotis, sobbing piteously, and the man turned and wrapped his arms around him, holding him tightly.

"My dear boy - my dear, brave boy - I swear that we won't leave you alone."

The room suddenly shifted, blurring with the passage of time. The starlit boy was now asleep in his cot, the blanket pulled up over his shoulders. He had his spear still in hand as he slept.

Kozmotis stood off to the side, talking in a hushed voice with Jem Breen and someone else, a woman that looked familiar - the guard maybe, that Kozmotis had relieved in the first vision? She had no scar on her face in this vision but she looked mostly the same otherwise. Captain Helias? Captain Jelias? It was something like that.

"Lal, what do you think?" Jem asked of Jelias. Apparently, that was her first name.

"What do I think of what?" she asked.

"About what should be done with the kid."

"What is there to do? We can't leave him here. Even if the fearlings don't come back to finish the job, what kind of life is that, leaving him here in a veritable graveyard all by himself?" she said, crossing her arms.

"Yeah, but we have to factor in what'll happen if he's brought back with us. Not that it'll be the worst, but with our luck, those astropologist muckity-mucks all fascinated with Star Herder culture will want to make a study of him. We take him back and we'll have no way of making sure he's placed with a family that'll do right by him. Not that anyone'd do wrong, but this is a delicate situation. The kid deserves people that'll help him deal with all this."

"Again, what else is there? I'm sure we can make it clear the kid's going to need some kind of special accommodations - to be placed with a family that respects his culture. That's all we can do - am I right, Koz?"

Kozmotis didn't answer. He was staring over at where the boy slept.

"Koz?" Lal nudged him now and he started.

"What? Oh. Yes. Yes, of course. What else can we do?" he said, and he looked back over at the boy, looking sad even in sleep. "I mean, the only other option, the only way to really ensure he's truly cared for would be for - for..." He looked back over to them. "For one of us to volunteer to take him in as a ward. With how often we've been decorated, the Community Health Offices wouldn't dare say no."

He paused and seemed to come to a decision, one that was a little wild but seemed to make perfect sense to him. "I could volunteer for it. I'm due for a good deal of shore leave anyway - I'd have time to get him acquainted with Rashena, get him comfortable and settled in, arrange for his schooling..."

Jem raised his eyebrows. "You sure about that, Koz?"

"Yes. Yes, of course. Why not?"

At that, Lal's face broke into a crooked grin. "Because you're a single father and one kid's responsibility enough?"

"Have I ever struck you as someone that shies away from responsibility?" he said dryly.

Both Jem and Lal could only snort at that.

"Not in the least," said Lal.

"Then, as long as he's amenable to it, I'll take him home with me. The matter's settled."

The world blurred again and now Jack was somewhere else entirely. He was now in the main foyer of rather spacious house and the starlit boy was being led in through the front door by Kozmotis, who was carrying two large bags with him.

"It's a bit of a maze, but you'll get used to it soon enough. It's been in the family for generations - my grandfather was one of the advisors to Queen Kila during the Reformation. I'd honestly prefer something smaller and bit more humble but nostalgia keeps getting in the way of house-hunting, to be perfectly honest."

The boy clung tightly to his spear as he walked into the foyer, and stood there awkwardly, wringing his hands on the handle. The size of the place seemed to leave him deeply discomfited.

"Now, my daughter and Nanny Gliggs should be in. Let's see if we can hunt them down to introduce you all to each -"

"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

"Ah, that'd be Rashena right now," Kozmotis said mildly. "Either that or Nanny Gliggs is practicing her dog whistling for the next moondog show. She raises thoroughbreds."

The source of the noise turned out to be a blur of movement and sound that might have once been a six-year-old child. Jack finally got a good look at her when she stopped moving, which was only when she'd jumped at Kozmotis in a hug that nearly bowled him over to the floor. Her skin was a dark bronze color that looked nothing like her father's paler skintone, but her facial features were undeniably like Koz's - she had the same facial structure, the sharp cheekbones and wide-set eyes. Even her nose protruded like his, though her mothers' features seemed to have softened it a little.

Laughing, he dropped his bags and swept her up in a massive hug, kneeling on the floor to make it easier.

"Daddy daddy daddy daddy!" she babbled enthusiastically, the silver tips of her dreadlocks bobbing like little stars that were threatening to fall out of the sky because of the gravitational forces of her excitement.

"Rashena Rashena Rashena Rashena!" he answered back and she laughed delightedly.

"Daddy, you're silly."

"Well, that's your fault, isn't it? I learned it from you."

The hugging went on for quite some time, before they finally pulled apart to deal with the boy standing there awkwardly with his spear.

"Rashena, I'd like to introduce you to someone."

"This is him? This is the star-boy?"

Kozmotis nodded and turned to the boy, gesturing at his daughter with his hand. "This is my daughter Rashena."

The girl walked over to him, cautiously at first, looking at the boy with wonder, but then she said, "If you're going to be my brother, you need a name other than 'star-boy.' There are lots of stars and lots of boys, but only one you, so you need a name. That's only fair."

The boy looked oddly touched at that announcement, looking over at Kozmotis questioningly, as if asking, 'I'm her brother already - It's just that easy, huh?'

"Daddy couldn't pronounce your name for me. Can you say it so I can hear what it sounds like?"

The boy said his name and just like before, it jingled all the way out of his mouth.

"There's kind of word sounds in it. Like a 'nuh' sound and a 'luh' sound and a 'tuh' sound. Maybe we can just try to do the sounds as best as we can in Common. Nuhtuhluhtuh. Natalata. Nuuuhtalatatuh. Natlat." Her mouth opened in a little 'o' of delight. "What if we call you Nightlight? You glow just like a nightlight and your name kinda sounds like that."

"Darling, we can't name him after a bedroom fixture," was Koz's dry answer to the idea.

Nightlight raised a hand at Pitch, as if to say 'Hold on a second' and then took out the little pad of paper he kept tucked in his armor and the pencil and wrote on the paper. Jack angled his head and move closer to read the writing as he held it up.

**What's a night-light? I know what the words mean by themselves in Common but not what they mean together. **

"Daddy, what's it say? I gotta learn to read better so I can talk to him."

"He's asking what a night-light is," Koz explained. "He knows the words but not what they mean together."

"A night-light is a light that you put on when you go to bed," Rashena explained, "before you go to sleep but after Nanny tucks you in and tells you bedtime stories, and it makes the night less scary and helps keep the fearlings away. A night-light lets you know you're safe. Daddy says you tried to keep people safe back at your home, so -"

"Rashena, that's a sad subject for him," Koz said gently. "It's not very nice to bring it up."

The boy shook his head again at Kozmotis and knelt down in front of the girl. He tried a few times to say the word and every time, it came out just a little too jingly, but the last time, he managed it, even if it still rang like little bells.

**"_Nightlight_," **he said, holding a hand to his chest, looking touched that she'd choose a name like that for him, a name that implied he protected people and held back the dark. It seemed as if it was a comfort.

"Nightlight, you're my brother now," Rashena declared, like the idea was wrought in steel. She reached out and took him by the hand that wasn't holding his spear. "So I'm gonna show you around and you can meet Nanny Gliggs and my pet glow-worm and then we can have dinner with daddy and then we can play outside, and then maybe we can read from my picture books because if you have to write on paper to talk, I need to read better so I can talk to you - and then we can go talk to Mr. Carmichal's cat - he doesn't talk back _or_ write but I think he understands people words..."

Kozmotis could only look on as his daughter dragged Nightlight away by the hand to explore the house. The boy followed behind happily, actually smiling, seeming incredibly amused at the girl's...effervescence.

"Oh, Ahava, what have I gotten myself into?" he asked to seemingly no one, and then the vision faded.

Jack was in an empty room with the skates once again staring at empty walls. For a good while, he could only stand there in silence, trying to make sense of everything he'd just seen.

"He had a kid," he finally said to himself. "He had a_ kid_. He had a wife. And a _kid_."

Jack's nose suddenly wrinkled in disgust as he realized the implications of that. .

"_Pitch_ had a kid," Jack said, shuddering. "Gross."

* * *

Back in the Siberian forest, the Guardians (and Jamie and Cupcake) gathered around as Bunny inspected tracks in the dirt, and after a moment, nodded.

"Yep, chicken feet," he said. "Torg's sent us after Baba Yaga."

"I haven't seen her since Sandy and I convinced her to take the Enkidu Oath," Tooth murmured, thoughtfully. She and Sandy exchanged small shrugs. "She might not be exactly _pleased_ to see us."

"Babboo who?" Cupcake echoed.

"You might think of Baba Yaga as the wicked witch, who does you just enough wickedness to prepare you for those who are wicked without reservation," Anansi said, rolling his eyes thoughtfully to the sky as he often did when seeking through his own head for a story. "Sometimes, the old woman who threatens to eat a child up has not eaten a child in_ centuries_."

Jamie looked with skepticism at the deep - very deep - chicken footprints in the dirt. "And she has chicken feet?"

Anansi barked out a laugh. "Don't be silly! Of course she has no chicken feet." He added, as if it made perfect sense, "Her house does."

"And she's coming back this way, by the sound of it," said Bunny, his ears flicking westward, as Jamie and Cupcake exchanged looks that said volumes about the silliness of houses with chicken feet.

"Baba Yaga has no quarrel with us," said North, as the groaning of trees suddenly reached their ears, and the wind that had sent the trees groaning swept over them.

"She didn't have quarrels with many who went into her hut and still they never came out," Anansi reminded him, but North just grinned.

"Many stories you have yet to tell me, Anansi, but this one? This one, I am knowing since I was a boy smaller than Jamie. Hah!" North laughed at the memory. "Is one thing to hear story of the wise witch who lives in the dark woods, with her chicken-footed hut and her teeth of iron, when you are warm on the savannah - but I tell you, it is thing entirely different to hear the same story at the edge of that dark forest yourself."

He stood in front of the party as the wind rose to a screech, and a small hut on chicken feet crashed through the trees. North looked it over with the same, unflapped smile.

"I have often wondered when fate would lead me to Baba Yaga's door."

The children stepped closer together, backing towards Tooth as they realized the wind wasn't screeching, the house was.

North held his ground as the screeching stopped. The chicken-footed hut dropped to the ground, and the sound of many locks unclicking filled the air before the door flew open.

The children jumped, but North only smiled. A wizened, skinny old woman with a nose so long, it seemed to lead her whole face past the door frame leaned on her broom in the doorway, glaring at the scene before her. Baba Yaga's eyes alighted on the husky Cossack standing tall before her door, and she bared her black iron teeth in an enormous grin.

Her cackle rattled the leaves around them. "Babushka eats well tonight! What are you waiting for, you slow fool?!"

North, undaunted, strode up the steps and into the hut. The door slammed like a punch behind him, and the locks clicked back into place.

"...Were...Were we supposed to go with him?" Jamie asked, each syllable as slow as anything hauled out of a bog.

"Nope," Anansi said, staring at the door as though he could see through it if he just tried hard enough. He heaved a sigh. "He'd better tell me what happened when he comes out. I only like secrets when I'm in on them."

* * *

Inside, sealed away from the Guardians, North crouched beneath Baba Yaga's roof as she whirled on him, studying him more closely. The Cossack stood silently as Baba Yaga scrutinized him, her features wrinkling deeper and deeper into disappointment at what she saw.

"You do not have time to buy my help, you young fool," she spat. "I don't have time to test you now - and don't believe for a moment I won't." she shook her long, bony finger in North's face, so fiercely that North even stepped back, pressed against the water tank "When the time comes, oh the things I have to do about the house - ! But no, you've come to me with not a moment to spare, and the boy's reputation is good -" she rolled her eyes. "And your reputation is good. Not that I abide by reputations."

She sniffed her long nose. "Tools, and nothing more! But if you stay to play my games of truth, the boy's reputation won't even be that anymore. So you will have to be in my debt."

North's face had been flickering in concern as the old witch mentioned Jack, but it cleared as she came to the topic of debt. He stuck his hand out without a moment's hesitation. "Deal, Babushka! I will do your impossible tasks, when we've rescued Jack."

Baba Yaga curled her fleshless hand around North's, squeezing it with surprising strength. "And if you do not succeed at them, why then," her eyes glittered. "I will feast after all!" she reached out quickly and pinched North's thick forearm, testing his flesh. Her iron teeth were bared in a horrible grin. "As I have not feasted, oh, in _centuries_. You will not be so tender as a child or a young maid, but -" she released his hand, shrugging. "We who have taken the Enkidu Oath don't have much in the way of choice, now do we?"

She eyed North fiercely. He beamed under her assailing gaze.

"Now," he said. "As to Jack -"

"Yes, your little snowflake." Baba Yaga turned away from North, rummaging through the cabinets lining her little hut. When she turned back to him, she held a handkerchief, a comb, and a mirror. She handed them to North, in that order. "When you leave my hut, drop the first of these. When you can no longer follow it, drop the next, and then again after that. When you have reached the end of how far my spells can take you, you will have found the one you must find next, to find the one you truly seek."

North took them, pocketing them carefully. "Babushka, you have my thanks. And the thanks of the Guardians as well."

"Thanks!" Baba Yaga spat into the sink. "Did thanks ever fill my water tank? Or make the soup for my dinner? It's not your thanks I want! When you come back, you will work for me as you would if I had time to test you, and if you do not, Guardian or no, such a curse I will place upon you!" she shook her finger again, backing North against the door. "Now go! You do not have time to be threatened! Locks, unlock!"

The door unlocked of its own accord, and fell open behind North. He sprawled on the forest path with a thud, looking up just in time to see the door shut and the chicken-footed hut whirl and stomp off through the suddenly windy forest.

* * *

Jack rounded a corner and heard another door slam behind him. He blinked, surprised to see the room of floating colors again. It seemed he'd barely left the same room five minutes ago.

Except -

Something was off. The last time he'd been in this place, the walls of the maze had been made of something else. The rough black granite had scraped threads loose in his hoodie when he leaned against it. The walls here were a pale, smooth substance, the a dull color unsettlingly like age-stained bone.

The last times he'd been surrounded by the lights, too, it seemed like every color across the spectrum had been present. Now there wasn't a single glimmer of blue. The absence left the still-full room seeming, in comparison, a little empty.

"Well," Jack said, as the skates stood in place. "At least this means we're not walking in circles, right, Footwear Friends?"

When he looked down, the image of the boy - of Nightlight - stood at the other side of the colored lights, looking straight at him.

"So, no time to enjoy the lights?" Jack asked, not expecting an answer. He didn't get one. Nightlight spun on his heel and ran, and Jack darted after him. The hall before him went dark as the door slammed behind and then lit up again.

Soldiers moved through the hallways of what looked like some kind of ship, passing through Jack like people once always had. The feeling instinctually made him clutch at his chest. Jack thought his surroundings looked all very naval as he looked around, all metal grating and narrow hallways and endless metal pipes, but a glance through a window made it clear that this ship wasn't one that went anywhere near water.

Through the porthole he saw a sun, taking up most of his view of space. The ship was floating around it, dipping in and out of the great halo of light that circled it like a whale occasionally surfacing for air.

"Whoa," he said quietly, hands pressed against the glass.

He'd been many places in his long life, but short of stowing away on Apollo 11, he'd never really had a way of getting up into space.

This wasn't space as anyone on Earth knew it, though. The way jets of plasma curled out in beautiful patterns from the nearby star made this look far more like the skies that might be illustrated in a children's book.

"I love refueling days," said a familiar voice and Jack turned to see Jem Breen yet again, though he looked a bit younger this time.

"They drive me mad," said Kozmotis, who was walking side by side with him once more. "All this sitting around with nothing to do."

"It must be devastating to you, having to miss out on opportunities for promotions."

Kozmotis, now the most casual Jack had seen him, simply whapped Breen in the ribs, making him laugh. "When I sit around, I prefer to be sitting around _at home_. And these Luna class ships take ages to refuel."

"Well, you can thank Tsar Lunar personally for that. Last class he designed before his son was born and he made that monstrosity that was in the news."

"It was a monstrosity, I saw a picture, it was _enormous_. All to run off and explore the universe with his family - which is insane, really."

"Well, if you were going out there in the big, bad universe to see all the wonders in it and had your family with you, you wouldn't be taking them in an economy-sized ship, would you? Not with the fearlings out there," Jem pointed out logically. "It's supposed to be impossible to break into."

"Let's hope it doesn't break down near a planet or the poor sods living on it will mistake it for a_ moon_."

Jem laughed at that.

Jack perked up, his interest piqued, but the two steered the conversation elsewhere and he had to trot to keep up with their long solders' strides.

"Anyway," Koz went on. "I'll see you in the mess later. Like I said, if I'm going to be sitting still I'd rather be sitting still at home and since I can't be at home, stellargraph messaging is the next best thing."

"Give my regards to the missus and the little lady."

Kozmotis smiled at that as he slipped into his quarters and Jack slipped in behind just before the door slid shut. The room was rather spartan and very, very cramped. Clearly, Kozmotis had rank enough to have a room of his own but this was apparently long before he got those shiny general pips on his collar.

He sat down in front of a strange device that looked like the communications devices that had always showed up in those old sci fi movies, except its design was a bit more mechanical-looking in nature. Golden gears were visible, chugging away as Kozmotis sat down, relaxed in his chair, and dialed home.

It made strange little blipping sounds until an image flashed on the screen of an older woman, maybe in her forties, with silver skin and white hair. Jack supposed this might be the nanny - Nanny Gliggs, wasn't it? - that Kozmotis had spoken of in one of the other visions.

"Hello, sir, lovely to see you this morning. Shore leave, I take it?"

"Good morning, Nanny. Pit stop. We're refueling so we've got some free time even though it's on ship. Is Rashena awake?"

A loud squealing noise came from somewhere else in the house. It was delighted squealing, the kind of squealing a small child made when they were entertaining themselves.

Kozmotis laughed. "I'll take that as a yes."

"I'll go get her, sir," said the woman, looking equal parts fond and wry, as if she was thinking 'It's not so funny when you're the one dealing with it every day.'

"Rashena, dear, your father's on the stellargraph."

The pitter-patter of little running feet reached the speakers before Rashena reached the viewing screen. Her starry-haired, bronzed face image filled the screen as she brought her face close to the camera. She looked just a bit younger than she'd been when Jack saw her last, like this had taken place a year or two before Pitch brought home Nightlight. "Daddy!"

Koz cracked a smile at her delight. "Rashena," he said. He spoke her name like he was keeping it safe for her.

"Daddy, did you get my message?"

Koz looked for a moment at a loss. "Your - message?"

Rashena's beaming smile dropped into a disappointed frown. "You didn't watch my message."

"I'm sorry, Darling," Koz said. "Things get so busy out here in the field."

"You need to check your messages more," Rashena admonished. "What if I left you one and I said something important and you missed it?"

"Did you say something important in your message?"

"Oh yes," Rashena nodded emphatically. "Lots of important things. You should go watch my message so you know what they are."

"Rashena, that's not practical. I can't listen to your message _while_ I'm talking to you."

Rashena huffed her disappointment, fixing her father with a pouty expression that said, without speaking, 'Did I ask you what was practical?'

"Do you -" Koz paused. "Do you want me to hang up, watch your message, then call you again?"

Rashena nodded emphatically. "Yeah, go do that."

Kozmotis looked halfway between charmed and consternated. "All right, then, I'll do that."

"Call back_ right_ after you watch it!" Rashena insisted.

"Right after," Kozmotis agreed.

"Love you," Rashena said, matter-of-fact, as she reached across the screen to awkwardly turn off the conversation from her end.

Koz's smile as he fiddled with the dials to call up his messages was small, but almost like the smile of someone dreaming. It was helpless and unconscious and Jack almost felt the same guilt at seeing it that he had at hearing Sandy's voice.

If all this was real, if this wasn't the maze just messing with his head and it had actually happened, and if this man seemed to be Pitch before he'd become Pitch, then what had happened to him? What horrific thing had turned him into the kind of monster that would back a child into an alley and threaten to snuff them out like a candle?

And, Jack wondered with a twist of his gut, what had happened to the little girl who clearly meant so much to him?

Rashena's message, while important to her, was fairly mundane. She hmm'd and dawdled on the screen, recounting her day at the park - until Nanny Gliggs' voice offscreen prompted her to remember why she'd called.

"Didn't you get a surprise today?" the nanny asked. Rashena's wide grey eyes widened a little more as she remembered.

"Yes!" the little girl ducked out of view, returning with a gold-wrapped package. "I got a present from Daddy! I got your surprise!"

She held the package up to the screen. The gold wrapping glittered, even through the view of the camera. "But I'm not going to open it," Rashena declared, pulling the present back, "until you can watch me open it. So hurry up and call because I'm waiting to be fair, so you should call soon to be fair!"

"Too much longer a message, and your father won't have time to call, dear," her nanny chided gently. Rashena nodded urgently.

"Bye, Daddy! Call soon!" As Nanny Gliggs reached in front of her to turn off the device, she leaned around the matron's arm. _"I really wanna open it!"_

Rashena was bouncing in her seat when Koz called her a second time.

_"Did you see it?"_ she squealed.

Koz had repressed his smile somewhat. He nodded. "I did, but darling, it's not practical to ask me to call twice. You could have told me all that in my last call."

Rashena's enthusiasm diminished. "I wanted you to see my message." She didn't sound upset yet. In fact, oddly for a little child, she sounded matter-of-fact, as if she were defending her position, more than justifying herself.

"These calls use valuable energy that could be used to keep the starship moving so that we can help protect people from fearlings."

Rashena started to pout slightly, her defense starting to wilt under her father's stern practicality.

Kozmotis sighed. "Don't you still have a surprise to open?"

Rashena brightened slightly at the distraction. "Yes. It's been sitting right here, all week. I didn't open it!" she pulled the golden box into view, shoving it up to the camera, showing her father the unbroken seams. "I didn't even peek!"

Kozmotis' smile flickered back. "Very patient," he said, approval in his voice. "Go ahead."

Rashena tore into the package with all the enthusiasm of a child at Christmas. The golden paper fluttered away in child-sized scraps to reveal a silver box almost beautiful enough to be a gift itself. Rashena paused, gasping with delight at the elegant traceries on the box.

"That's not the surprise," Kozmotis urged. "Open it."

Rashena pulled the lid off the box. Jack's eyes widened as she pulled out another box - the same music box he'd toyed with earlier in the maze. It glinted gold in the light, designs of stars and galaxies splayed across the lid, carved so intricately that every time she moved her hand it seemed that they were swirling.

"Keep going," Kozmotis urged. She flipped the lid open. Music slightly, but not entirely, like that Jack had heard before poured out from the box, and Rashena pulled out a gleaming golden pendant.

No - she flipped it open. It was a locket.

"That's us!" she squealed, pointing at the picture inside. Jack craned his neck to see, but couldn't get a glimpse of the portrait.

"Yes," Kozmotis agreed. "Your mother thought it would be nice to always have us close to your heart."

"Do you think that too?" Rashena asked, as she fiddled with the clasp.

"Of course," said the stoic soldier.

The little star-haired girl clutched the locket close to her heart, her smile suddenly subdued.

"Then how come you won't come home?"

"I'm sorry, dear, but it's less that I won't and more that I can't. I have a duty to uphold. When you're older you'll understand."

"I don't want to be older then."

"Well, someday you're going to be. I'm sorry, but I can't come home right now. I have shore leave coming up soon, though, and both your mother and I will be home to see you."

"You're being a poophead."

"Rashena -"

"Only poopheads won't come home."

"Rashena, darling, I know it's difficult sometimes, but -"

"Poophead!"

"Rashena -"

There were tears in her eyes now. "I'm going to play with my glow-worm," she said and she ran off before Koz could get in another word.

He sighed and after a moment of waiting to see if she'd come back, he hit a button that cut off the message.

After a minute of sitting there, he dialed someone new. Another minute or two, and a woman appeared on the screen, smiling. Her face was freckled like a night with stars - literally. Her skin was the endless blackness of deep space, and silver flecks gleamed across her high cheekbones like flakes of mica. Her hair was a stunning silver web of ornate braids. She was wearing some kind of uniform, also in shades of red, black, and gold like all the soldiers wore, but it looked far less like a military uniform and more like something off of a show like Star Trek.

"Hello there, handsome."

Kozmotis sighed like a smitten schoolboy. "There are the stars of my night."

"Ew," Jack interjected from behind him, even though neither could hear.

"My ray of morning sun," the woman responded, her smile no less affected. "I miss you."

"I miss you too, Ahava," said Kozmotis. That name - he'd spoken it in another memory, when he'd brought Nightlight home to meet Rashena. It was clear to see, now that Jack thought of Rashena, exactly how her mother's features had softened her father's harsh ones in their little girl's face.

So Ahava was Pitch Black's _5_. "Still ew."

"How long since we were even on the same ship?"

"So long I'm beginning to forget what warmth is," Ahava crooned, her voice touched with real longing.

"This is the worst part of the whole maze," Jack interjected, his face twisting as he gagged. He considered plugging his ears and humming his way through the rest of this memory. "Worse than the giant spiders."

"I don't suppose you're watching this message somewhere private?" Kozmotis asked with the barest edge of hope in his voice.

"Oh, please no," Jack said despondently, hoping desperately that this part of the maze would let him go if this got anymore intense. Ew ew ew.

"I'm afraid not."

"Thank you, sweet spirit of mercy."

"Well then I look forward more than ever to our upcoming shore leave," Kozmotis said. "How's the mission going? That commander still giving you hell?"

"He's finally gotten off my back. I had to prove him wrong about the gravitational flux of the binary system first, which, by the way, took a very detailed presentation and the entire crew attended."

Kozmotis laughed at this, a laugh so deep and hearty - and delighted - that Jack was surprised he was even capable of feeling that kind of joy.

"Let me get this straight, after all that, the months of doubting your calculations and trying to undermine your work, you took him to school in front of the captain and the entire crew. Via slideshow."

Ahava just grinned. "You would not believe the proofs I laid out. I haven't shown my work this much since school. By the end of it, he looked as if he'd chew off his own leg to escape."

"That's my girl."

"And what about you, Mister Promotion?"

Koz looked surprised and then somewhat disappointed. "What ruined the surprise? I've been dying to tell you all week."

"I do keep an eye out for the military news."

"I did get promoted, yes. Captain now," he said, preening slightly.

"Ooh la la! Captain Kozmotis Pitchiner, there's a name," Ahava purred, cradling her chin in her hands. "He certainly sounds like a man whose wife owns small, silky things that may or may not get stuck in his teeth."

Jack promptly curled up on the floor in abject misery with his hands over his ears, and loudly sang several verses of The Bird Song, fervently wishing that he was not listening to any of this. When he, suspiciously, pulled a hand away from his ear, the two of them seemed to have left that horrifying visual far behind in favor of…

"She called me a poophead," Kozmotis said miserably, which changed to an expression of mild reproach when his wife made a noise that sounded more like laughter than sympathy.

"She has keen observational skills, if not the most impressive vocabulary," Ahava answered. "Oh don't make that face, I'm only teasing! Why are you a poophead today, dear heart?"

"I told her I couldn't come home until I had shore leave," Kozmotis said. This time Ahava's face did take a turn for the sympathetic.

"She misses you," she said softly. "It's hard for all of us - hard for you to be out there without us, and hard for us to be where we are without you."

"But she should know how important it is that I be out here - for you _and_ for her. She should know that eventually, I'll always make it home -"

"Darling, she's a little girl," Ahava pointed out. "Everything is still new to her. She's too busy_ experiencing_ things_ to_ know."

Koz rested his chin on his hand, a rare informal stance. "Now how does a mathematician know the poetry of child psychology?"

"I read more than military news," Ahava chuckled. "Enjoy our little flower while we have her, honey. She's not going to be a little girl forever."

"I know, that's what I told her."

"_Do_ you know?" Ahava asked, raising her silver eyebrows. Koz's serious expression suggested that he hadn't really thought about it - not deeply - but now he was.

"You think I'm too stiff with her at times, don't you?"

"You can be a bit dour, you know. And she's a child. You are out there protecting children like her, yes, but you're not just protecting their lives, you're protecting them from having to live in fear. You're making it so they can spend their time as children feeling joy. You all may be soldiers, but you're guardians of much more than their lives. A little more silliness and a little less austereness now and again wouldn't be remiss. "

Jack's brows furrowed as he listened to her speak and then he looked over at Pitch's face to see what his reaction would be to that.

It turned out to be a sigh and grudging acknowledgement. "You do have a point. I suppose there are ways I can make it clear I have my responsibilities that are a little less...stern."

Jack could only stare at Kozmotis' face, full of love and concession - the face of a man who could compromise, who had empathy. Who loved a child, and protected her chance to have a childhood.

"What happened to you?" Jack asked, softly. If there was a point to these memories, now he wanted to know it.

Then just like that, the moment before him was gone and he was suddenly in the middle of a battlefield. Soldiers were fighting viciously around him and what they fought against was like nothing he'd ever seen. The creatures they were slashing at with their swords were monstrous, their bodies an inky black, limbs stretched out and grossly disproportionate. They slashed at the soldiers with massive claws and bit them with razor sharp teeth, and their chittering, childlike laughter and screeches were something that was going to haunt Jack's nightmares.

He weaved and ducked through the battle instinctually, even though he knew that nothing in it could touch him. That led to him almost running through Kozmotis who was leading a squad of men as they cut the things down. Jack saw a sword gleaming in his hand and as it raised into the air on an upstroke, he realized it was the same sword he'd picked up and had heard whispering to him in the room where he'd found Rashena's music box.

"Left flank, forward march!" he cried out.

The beings they were fighting were getting beaten rather soundly, but the soldiers were still taking casualties. Jack scurried away in horror as a soldier fell down dead in front of him, his throat slashed open.

Yet there was Kozmotis, leading his men forward into the fray, utterly fearless as he fought the horrible creatures. Jack couldn't help admire it, which was a very strange feeling to have to wrestle with. A guardian indeed. Ahava had been right about that. All of these soldiers were guardians of a sort.

Up in the sky, ships circled and it looked as if they were blasting at the beings with light up in the atmosphere or sucking them into massive traps. Before long, the last of the creatures were retreating, only to be annihilated or captured as they tried to escape and as soon as the last of them fell, the soldiers let out a cheer.

"Quickly, we have to tend to the survivors. Last sweeps and then open the shelters, have the medics at the ready. It looks like several ships are docked at the colony right now and -"

Kozmotis trailed off as he looked over at the docking port and finally saw the name of one of the ships there, his face going a pale tone that Jack was much more familiar with.

"Lieutenant Breen, I need you to take over command," he said distantly.

"Sir?" Breen asked next to him.

"I may be...compromised. I need you to take over command," Kozmotis said. Jem turned and looked at the spaceport.

"Oh, stars," he said breathlessly when he saw the ship, the name 'Aurora' emblazoned on the side.

"Sir?" questioned another officer as he saw their captain standing there in shock.

"That's his wife's research vessel. They must have stopped to try to help the colonists -" Breen explained but Kozmotis didn't stay to listen. He broke rank and started canvassing the area, looking at the bodies laying on the ground. Jack ran after him, not even needing the pull of the invisible tether, a pit of horror cracking open in his stomach.

Kozmotis had said something about not being able to protect his wife in later memories, had spoken of her like she hadn't been there anymore, like she'd been -

_"NO!"_ the cry was plaintive and horrified and Kozmotis surged forward, dropping to knees next to the entrance of some kind of shelter, where other soldiers were releasing the people hiding inside.

Right next to the entrance was a body, laying ragged and bloodied on the ground.

And there she was, her once bright eyes open and staring at nothing, her body carved up by countless cuts and gashes, some kind of blaster still held loosely in her hand. Her blood had made mud of the torn dirt around her.

Kozmotis gathered her up into his arms, letting out a wrenching cry that tore into Jack's heart with hooks. Even though this was his enemy, this pain was real, this grief was sincere and it wasn't any less so because this man, Kozmotis Pitchiner, had somehow eventually been destroyed to make way for the nightmare known as Pitch Black.

Kozmotis wept uncontrollably as he held her, as the other soldiers and refugees could only look on in pity. Eventually, after what seemed like ages, when the flash flood of his grief had subsided to the low flow of floodwaters over the barricades, a young woman that had come out of the shelter stepped forward and knelt next to him.

"She saved us," the girl said quietly. "She held them at the entrance so we could all get in and when they grabbed her, she kicked the button to seal the door so they couldn't come after us. I just - I just thought you should know. I'm so, so sorry."

The world shifted away from the tear-stained face of a man facing down the worst agony he'd known in his life and shifted to a scene in the foyer of Pitch's house. His face was blank now and lined with wrinkles that hadn't been there before. He was kneeling in front of his daughter, tears trickling down his face, hands on her shoulders as tears poured down hers.

"I'm so sorry."

"I want mommy! Where's mommy?! I want mommy!"

"I'm so sorry, darling. I'm sorry."

"I want moooommy," the girl sobbed. "I want moooommmy."

They wept together, clinging to each other, and seeing the little girl's pain caused tears to brim in Jack's eyes. If he was honest with himself, seeing Kozmotis' pain was causing it, too.

Had this been the start? Had it started something that later propelled Kozmotis into being Pitch? But if it had, wouldn't he have been less compassionate later, when he'd taken in Nightlight? If this had started it all, would he have still been out there fighting, trying to protect people from the things that were hiding in the dark?

The memory faded away and Jack was left alone in the maze to stare at the stone walls surrounding him. The skates flew up next to him and he looked up at them and then shook his head in confusion.

"How? How could someone like that -" Someone who loved others and fought for people's lives and the innocence of children, someone that fought to put an end to fear… "- have turned into _Pitch_?"

Why was the maze showing him this? What did it all _mean_?

* * *

The children had been left with Sandy and the sleigh quite some distance away. They were a boon in a fight against Pitch and nearly untouchable by the Bogeyman because of their lack of fear when dealing with him, but the Guardians were already anxious about having brought children along with them. There was no way they were letting them get remotely near Krampus, even despite the fact that he'd taken the Enkidu Oath decades before.

North still wanted to kill him. He was not, by his nature, a particularly murderous man. Even back in his days of being a thief and vagabond, he had not killed unless he'd had to for the sake of his own survival. But the existence of the goat-man had always chafed at him and it had always taken a great deal of willpower to keep himself from solving his problems with the other spirit permanently.

"You gonna be calm about this, mate?" Bunny asked, pausing again to sniff the wind and make sure they were still on the scent. North grunted. "Because we can swap you out for Sandy otherwise."

"I am calm," North answered. After all those years of making his holiday one of wonder and joy, of happiness and togetherness and delight, Krampus had come along and tried to drag himself out of the shadow of disbelief by latching onto Christmas like a parasite. North had sympathy enough for the myths who the times left behind. There were myths who had died, and the world had lost their names, and others whose names had simply slipped out of human memory, who'd faded with them. It was a sorrow, and for many, a deep terror - one the Guardians had been sobered to remember not so long ago.

But Krampus had chosen pain and fear as his way of gaining a new foothold in the world, and had caused an association between such things and Christmas, no less.

It was only the fact that Pitch could have taken over Krampus's bogeymannish role that had stayed North's hand when he'd faced the monstrous being last, around the turn of the 20th century. Pitch had long since been defeated but North had always been the most vigilant of the Guardians when it came to Pitch and he'd not wanted to leave a power vacuum that the Nightmare King would have filled all too eagerly.

So it had been the Enkidu Oath for Krampus, a vow to never again harm another child - or anyone else, for that matter. And he had languished in the dark, becoming just a scary tale told to children on Krampusnacht, one that vanished in the light of morning when they raced down to their gifts the next day. Before long, the fearsome creature had become a furry cherub on holiday cards, and children feared him more like they might fear the exhilarating drop of a roller coaster than something they felt would come for them in the dark.

Still, even though he had fallen, while North preferred that myths choose to stop causing harm rather than force the hands of the Guardians, it was one of the only times North had regretted offering the Oath to a defeated enemy.

North stared at the abandoned building that lay before them.

"There will be traps," he said to Bunny, Tooth, and Anansi. "He has always had a gift with machines and devices like I have."

It had been in imitation of North, born of his desire supplant him. If Krampus had gotten his way, there would have still been a Christmas, one in which the good children still got their toys, but the naughty would have been punished by a fate far worse than receiving coal.

"We must not let him get away," North told the others. "This could be our only chance to find Jack."

Next to him, he saw Tooth's feather flare out in a sign of aggression, holding out her hands as if her nails were talons. Bunny was holding his boomerangs in a way that suggested he was planning on seeing how easily they might break Krampus's head. Anansi's armored exoskeleton suddenly appeared over his skin as he brought himself up on his spider's legs.

The sight of it suddenly made North laugh.

"What am I saying? Of course he will not get away."

With that Bunny opened a hole in the Earth and after a quick slide through his tunnels they suddenly appeared inside the building.

It was very, very old and nearly falling apart. If not for the magical influence of Krampus, it probably would have fallen apart many, many years before. As they moved cautiously past abandoned bedrooms and a long hall that may have served as a dining area, it became clear that once upon a time, very long ago, this had possibly been an orphanage.

It was still decorated for a Christmas that had long since past, shriveled wreaths hanging on doors, dead garlands threaded around the railing of the stairwell. In one room, broken ornaments gray with a coating of dust hung on the skeleton of a long-dead Christmas tree.

"I smell blood," Bunny said, sniffing. "Old, though. Very, _very_ old."

North gritted his teeth. "It must have been not long before I defeated him and made him take the oath. Pah, some days I still wonder why I gave him the choice at all."

"Beating him shapeless again should make you feel better," Bunny pointed out.

The sudden sound of a tensing wire caught their attention. Bunny's ears whipped to the left, and the others' eyes followed. "Anansi! Look ou-"

But the warning came too late. A wire snapped against Anansi's chitinous black-shelled leg, and the ceiling above him opened up, showering him with a flood of spiders. Anansi's shriek flooded the hall.

"OH MY ME! THEY'RE SO CUTE!"

His eyes glittered as he cupped his hands, hairy brown bodies spilling over his fingers. "Look at you! Look at all your shining little eyes, you hairy little jewels!" he scritched at one with a careful finger as the spider, along with most of the others, bit him. "Your venom is so POTENT! Your mother must be so proud!"

As one, the rest of the Guardians took several steps away from the spider-coated Spider, still cooing over the trap he'd tripped.

As they moved forward, a net shot out from a wall and was immediately shredded to bits by Tooth's razor sharp wings. She rolled her eyes.

"This is pretty pitiful," she said, looking unimpressed.

Something else fwapinged as they started moving up the stairs and a massive ball covered in spikes started rolling down the stairs. Now it was Bunny's turn to roll his eyes, as he tapped his foot and the ball disappeared into one of his tunnels.

"Too right. How was this clown ever a threat?" he asked.

"Do not underestimate him," said North. "This is merely distraction."

They kept moving. Up on the second floor, a trap door opened under Anansi, one he easily traversed with his massive spider's legs.

"Don't look, little ones, that seems like a very scary drop," he cooed to the little spiders.

Some strange kind of clockwork machine, swords clasped in its hands, exited from a room, and North casually sliced it to bits. Ahead of them was a room that had the doors locked and bolted - and magically warded.

"This looks like it will take some time to get through," North said, which was why instead of trying to get through it, he looked out the nearest window, only to see a brown-furred figure running towards the treeline down below.

Bunny crowded in at the window. "Looks like he's done a runner."

"I told you, do not underestimate him. He meant to keep us distracted getting into room, thinking him there, while he escaped," North said, jumping out the window. Bunny and Anansi followed, and Tooth zipped out and flew ahead of them. Faster than even Bunny could catch up to Krampus, she tackled him to the ground near the treeline. Initially he tried to fight back and claw at her, but she punched him until he stopped struggling. Then she hovered over him as the others caught up, teeth bared, head crest flaring, letting out a strange hissing sound the other Guardians had only ever heard her make a rare few times in their time fighting at her side.

The rest of the Guardians caught up and looked down on him, sitting there pitiful and bloodied in the snow, one of his jagged horns broken by the Tooth Fariy's barrage.

"You are going to tell us what we want to know," North said, pointing one of his sabers at the snaggle-toothed creature. "Or you will die."

Krampus sat up in the grass and laughed. "You're not going to kill me, North, or you'd have done it ages ago."

"You have some value alive, yes. But perhaps you have more value to me without limbs?" North's blade plunged down into the meat of Krampus' shoulder, pinning the half-goat monster down into the ground, then planted a heavy boot in Krampus' mouth when he opened it to scream. "Hush. There are children not far from here, they do not need to hear screaming." He twisted his blade, just a little. "Screaming is distressing."

He crouched down, keeping his boot in Krampus' mouth and his saber in his shoulder. "I am very fond of Jack Frost, you know," he said, and it almost sounded conversational, if a conversation sounded like a sharp knife wrapped in silk. "He is endearing, and he opens eyes and brings joy, and he is a child. I can tell by the shape of your chest that your body remembers what happened the last time I found you harming children, even if your mind has somehow forgotten."

He shifted his weight, tapping a strangely concave spot on Krampus' chest with the tip of his other sword, and the creature made a strangled gagging noise. "Ah, you do remember? Wonderful."

North went on, "I like to think of myself as a good man, with morals. But there is very, very little I would not do to protect a child. You do not want to test those limits, Krampus. Not when they are so strained in regard to you as they are already."

He sheathed the saber not in Krampus' shoulder, and yanked the other free as well before extracting his tooth-scored boot from the creature's mouth. He stooped and lifted the goat-man out of the snow by a handful of the thick fur covering his throat.

"Unlike you, who only imitate," he said, so softly that the other three Guardians could barely hear him, "I am a creative man. I would suggest you tell us who you built that trap for and where we can find them before I turn that creativity on you. If you do not, well…" His next words were a whisper in Krampus' ear alone, whisked away from the other three by the wind.

"Alright!" Krampus protested in a strangled voice. "I'll talk, I'll talk!"

"Quickly," North said sharply.

"I made the puzzle box for Pitch," Krampus growled, beady red eyes narrowed as he started hatefully at the Guardian. "I didn't know which of you he was going to use it on or what he was going to use it for. All he wanted was something he could use to bring a Guardian the places he wanted to bring them. I asked if he'd harm them and he said no." Very conveniently, so that Krampus' oath hadn't kicked in. "So I was free to deliver as asked - after all, how was I to know he didn't just want to have a little chat, no?"

"Where?" North said, slamming the goat-man into a nearby tree. "Where did it take him in the end? Where would he be now?"

"Camelot. Pitch found Camelot and he wanted it to be the last place it led to. There's an entrance under the London subway. Notting Hill Gate. It leads to the crossroads that goes to where Merlin hid Camelot before he disappeared. I don't know what he wanted with the boy." His crooked teeth were bared in a grin. "But I sure hope it was something terrible."

North snorted with disgust and dropped Krampus in a heap before turning to the other three. "There is no time to waste. Back to the sleigh, then to Camelot."

"What did you say to that yobbo?" Bunny asked as he turned to lope back toward the sleigh. North shrugged.

"I tell him that I will bargain to leave him on the Small Planet ride," he said. "For what feels like lifetimes."

Anansi whistled, sounding impressed. "Making deals with Baba Yaga and the Mouse in one day? That's a mark of a brave man if I ever heard one."

Behind them, laughter started, like the slow slide of the face of a mountain at the beginning of an avalanche and then it rumbled behind them as Krampus cut loose. The Guardians all turned to face him and he just grinned a bloody grin at them as he brayed his goat-like laugh.

"You really think it's that easy, don't you, you old blowhard?" Krampus said to North. "That you're going to just whisk off to save him, no harm done."

The laughter stopped but the malicious expression on Krampus's face didn't hold any less glee.

"No matter what it takes," said North. "We will find him."

"I don't doubt you will," the goat-man's lips curled into an even bigger smile. "But there's no way you'll find him soon enough to save him, not if I'm right about where Pitch sent him. But that was always your greatest weakness, wasn't it, North? Always so self-assured, even when it wasn't warranted."

North cocked his head to the side. "What do you mean by this? What has been done to Jack?"

"Oh, you'll see. Some things are better left as a surprise, aren't they, North? And there are even more surprises left to come, you know. I'm not the only one that despises the Guardians and we're all a little tired of hiding in the dark. Luckily, we've met a new friend that wants to help us come out and play - and when that happens, everything you believe in, everything you stand for will crumble into _dust_."

North started marching back towards the other spirit but he simply waved a hand, as a light suddenly appeared around him, and there was a noise like the universe tearing. Pulled out of the place where it was hidden in his matted fur, a little device was whirring in his hand.

"After all, when it comes down to it...who guards the Guardians?"

Krampus disappeared right before North reached him again.

"Bah!" North said loudly, turning away again. "Next time, he would be more useful with less arms!"

Bunny and Anansi continued back toward the sleigh, but Tooth hovered in place until North caught up. She patted the other myth on the shoulder.

"More limbs than I'd leave him with," she said. North made a noise like a laugh and she smiled at him. "You're a good man, Nicholas St. North."

North paused for a moment. "'Good', perhaps," he said slowly. " 'Nice'..."

It took him a moment, but he found the words. "Nice is not part of job description."

Tooth nodded sharply, and the two of them moved to catch up with the others.

"Anansi, only one spider in sleigh at a time!"

"But it's too cold here for these precious creatures!"

* * *

The next room of lights was walled in splintered wood, and the lights hovered with greater space between them.

"All right, I get it, no more pretty lights for me," Jack grumbled. "Eventually."

The rooms were still huge, the lights still floating in lovely, heart-warming masses. At the rate they diminished, Jack could expect to wander for years through the maze and still have light in his life.

And the Guardians would _certainly_ find him before years had passed. Jack strode through the lights at a defiant pace, admiring them like a tourist on a casual stroll, not a prisoner clinging to his last comforts.

The door slammed behind him, and the smell of rot slammed into Jack's senses.

He gagged on nothing, his empty stomach twisting at the wet stench and the feel of chilly mud beneath his bare feet. His eyes adjusted to the dimness of the unlit room and he backed against the door, waiting to see the body that was rotting into the smell.

It wasn't a room and there wasn't a body. It was a field, and there were hundreds of bodies. Hundreds of dead rabbits, some encased in ice, some half-frozen and decomposing in the still air. A few of the dead rabbits stared at him with too-human eyes locked open by the ice.

Jack's stomach twisted again and he leaned against the door for support.

He saw another door at the far side of the field and bolted for it. The melting ice had pooled on the dirt and grass in a muddy, cold slick, and he struggled not to slip - and not to step on any bodies as he went.

It had to be an illusion. It had to be - Anansi had been very clear when he'd told Jack the story of what had happened to the pookas, and Bunny had confirmed it. He'd buried them in the warren himself. From them had grown flowers, and trees, and the light and life had come back to that place in time. This was no more than a horrific reconstruction. These were not actually the bodies of his friend's long-dead family that he was narrowly avoiding stepping on.

Yet even running through the memory felt like a desecration.

Jack reached the door opposite the field and threw himself through it, pulling it shut behind him. He leaned against the wall, breathing in the stale, but scentless, air.

The maze was built on fear. Jack had experienced his own fears and had stumbled onto Pitch's, who he knew was there in the maze - or had been, at one point.

Anansi had traumatized Jack with the story of the aftermath of Old Man Winter's attack on the Bunny's home, but the field of frozen pookas wasn't _his_ fear. Perhaps that meant the Guardians had found the maze but gotten caught in it themselves, and were looking for him. For a moment, that thought lifted his spirits, but then he nearly heaved his empty stomach as he thought of Bunny stumbling, unwary, onto that frozen field.

If the others were lost in the maze, he had to hope they would find him - that they would all find each other - soon. They could face their fears together, if not without being hurt by them, at least better than they could alone.

The Guardians would save him soon, he thought, as he came upon another crossroads and bit his finger to mark the wall with another number in blood.

They'd find him before he saw anything so awful that he couldn't forget it, before anything in here scarred him for life.

They'd find him.

They would.

They'd find him.

That was when the unending litany started, going on in the back of his head, the background noise of his new existence:

_Please find me. Please find me. Please find me. Please find me. Please find me..._


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's Note:** Sorry for the wait. The upside is the chapter got so long we split it into two. The next one - which is a big'un - will be posted on November 1st. Expect big things. Big, possibly horrible things. For both Jack and Kozmotis.

* * *

**The Boy Who Found Fear At Last**

by Kira, Kate, and Kaylin

* * *

**Chapter 4**

Jack couldn't go forever without sleep. Myths could go sleepless for a very long time, but it was like a small part of them still ached for a bit of mortality, and what was more mortal than having to sleep? The stress of the maze, occasional injuries, and long stretches of solitude made it even harder to stay awake without a good rest. Occasionally, Jack felt sleep overcome him.

There was no truly safe place to sleep in the maze, but the rooms of lights had never held any dangers, no matter how many times he passed through them. So it was in one of those rooms - this one with even fewer lights than before - that Jack settled on for a nap, telling his skate buddies to keep watch and nudge him if something happened.

His dreams took him down endless corridors, with voices calling out to him from empty spaces.

They were frightening, but one loud voice spoke words that seemed meant to reassure him.

_**it will end…**_

_**it will end...**_

It gave him hope that even the maze had an end. But it might not have been meant to be hopeful. Maybe it meant that his life would end.

Maybe it would end sooner than he thought. A tickle at Jack's neck woke him, just before he felt his air cut off. Something was choking him. His eyes shot open and his hands flew to the hands currently wrapped around his neck. No one stood above him, no body pressed him down, but those fingers dug into his neck, resisting his attempts to pry them off.

"_Grck_!"

Wheezing, Jack pried the fingers away, thrusting the hands away. They landed on the floor, a bloodshot eye blinking in each palm.

It was that grotesque hand creature! The one from that strange room of boxes with the music box and Kozmotis' sword.

It skittered towards Jack's leg. He jumped back a few steps as if the floor under his feet was on fire and kicked it as hard as he could. It flew and slammed into the stone wall so hard that blood smeared the wall as it fell down. It skittered away when it landed, still trailing blood.

Jack staggered deeper into the maze, putting distance between himself and the hand. He collapsed against the wall and slid down it, breathless.

He finally caught his breath after a few moments of wheezing.

He looked up at his skate friends. "Why didn't you guys wake me up?" he croaked, his hoarse voice betraying his hurt. He rubbed at his neck. "That thing could've killed me! Why didn't you warn me?"

The skates simply hovered there for a moment, tilted as if they were staring down at him. Then they did a sudden joyful pirouette and skated away.

"Hey! Where are you going?"

They disappeared around a corner. Jack ran after them.

"Huey, Louie, I'm not_ that_ mad! It's okay, I know you didn't mean to - hey, guys, come back!"

He was losing them now, as they picked up speed and disappeared around another corner. Jack's eyes welled up with tears.

"Guys, come back! I'm sorry, I didn't mean to yell."

He skidded around another corner and saw them. They'd gotten far, far ahead of him.

"Please don't leave!" he cried out. He ran as fast as he could, but he was still winded from being strangled and couldn't keep up. "Please!"

They zipped around another corner and when Jack ran around it, he saw a junction where multiple hallways met. Five of them, to be exact, and no sign of the skates. There was no way he'd be able to find them now.

Jack dropped to his knees, eyes still brimming with tears at the thought of facing the maze alone, something in his chest twisting painfully.

The feeling was a familiar one. One that, once upon a time, he'd hoped he'd never have to know again. Now it was the only thing he knew. Apparently, what the maze gaveth, it taketh away.

Maybe the taking was why he'd been given it at all.

* * *

When Nightlight appeared again, Jack followed him, subdued. The next vision left him floating in space again, overlooking a planet that sparkled as if it were made of diamond, and a ship descending towards it. Kozmotis' ship. But the sight that took up his attention was the swath of - Jack wasn't sure what to call it. It hung across the blackness of space, a colorless nothing that lead to and away from the planet - some horrible trail cut into space itself.

The ship landed and Jack landed with it, finding himself once again on the world Nightlight had come from. It looked hardly different from the last time he saw it, but he quickly understood why when the soldiers all deployed from the ship. This must have taken place shortly before the other memories he'd seen. He spotted Kozmotis leading his men and followed. Their search took him through a village.

The village was a crystalline sort of organic, with twisty, black-barked trees growing in orderly rows between buildings grown from crystal. Some of it had been hewn aside to make smooth walls, but others had allowed the crystal to grow in its natural spires. Unlike earth crystal, these spires twisted like the trees in smooth, molten loops. Light bent through the curved stones, shining on the ground like water pouring from a fountain, pooling in decorative patterns on the sandy black soil.

"Fan out," said Kozmotis.

"Sir! Over here, sir!"

The soldier moved into an area that looked like it might have been some kind of meeting hall. The moment Jack moved into the room to take a look, he regretted it.

Bodies lay in a massive circle in the center of the room. The dead looked like Nightlight, their skin in various shades of white and cream and pale gold. There were men and women and even the elderly - and and every one of them a weapon in their hands, or one near enough to have fallen from them. Every one was cut open, their gashes still flowing with blood, the ground soaked where they lay.

Jack gagged twice before getting his stomach under control.

In the center of the circle was an empty space, where various handmade dolls and toys had been discarded. Kozmotis stepped over the bodies into the center of the circle and picked up a wooden doll, one not so different from the doll North had made for Jack. Jack's hand instinctively went to the doll, still in his pocket.

"They must have fought to the last man and woman to protect their children," Kozmotis said ruefully, placing the doll down again out of respect. He stepped away from the pile and back to his men. "We have to look for survivors."

Jack followed the soldiers as they searched. They didn't find any.

At least not until they found a cave outside the village.

"Sir, the lighting in here -" said one of the soldiers. "It might have been strong enough to keep the fearlings out."

The cave had crystals like in the village but where they seemed to capture light, these emitted it on their own. It was nearly as bright as day in the cave. The crystals that did not emit light of their own caught and split the light from the others so that the interior of the cave was dappled with light of every color.

A soldier inside the cave called out. "Over here! I think I found a survivor!"

Kozmotis hurried in after him. "Where?"

"In here, sir, they're - whoa!" The soldier jumped away just before a familiar crystal-tipped spear thrust out of a hole in the wall, a hidden nook in the cave. If he hadn't jumped out of the way in time, the soldier would have been speared in the thigh.

"Everyone back away. They're probably in a panic."

Jack winced, remembering that Nightlight had been the only one to survive the attack on his village. Was this that memory, or the memory of some other Star Herder village that had been even less lucky?

Kozmotis stood next to the hole and spoke quietly to whoever it was inside.

"I'm Captain Kozmotis Pitchiner, of the 5th regiment of the Golden Army. We mean you no harm."

The Star Herder didn't want to leave the hiding spot apparently. Kozmotis sighed.

"We want to help you. We have food. We can provide medical care for any injuries you might have. We need you to come out and put down your weapon."

Still the Star Herder hid.

"We can't help you unless you come out."

Apparently, the Star Herder didn't want to be helped.

Kozmotis sighed and resheathed his sword.

"Sir, what are you doing?"

"Something mad," he said calmly, kneeling down in front of the hole. The spear immediately shot out at his head and he calmly knocked it aside, grabbing onto it and _yanking_. It wasn't enough to pull the Star Herder out of the hole, but it was enough for Koz to yank the spear away and bring the wielder within reach.

There was a kicking, biting, vicious struggled as Kozmotis dragged Nightlight out and held him close, even as he fought to get free. The boy looked much more of a mess than he had in the later vision. He was injured and covered in dirt and his face was streaked with tears, as if he'd been crying for days.

Jack could sympathize.

Other soldiers moved forward to help, but Kozmotis snapped out, "Stay back. You'll only - mmf - frighten him even more."

"He's hardly more than a child," murmured a soldier behind the two. And she was right - Nightlight looked younger than Jack had been when he died, and looked younger still in Kozmotis' arms.

Nightlight fought against Kozmotis' grip, but the soldier held on tight, rocking him in place, hushing him gently.

"Sssh. It's alright. You're safe now. We're not going to hurt you. We're not going to hurt you, child. You're safe."

The boy, finally realizing that these were not fearlings trying to deceive him, started to calm. He began to shake uncontrollably in Kozmotis' arms.

"It's all over. We won't let the fearlings hurt you anymore."

The shaking was not just shaking now. Nightlight wept despondently, his mewling cries like the tinkling of stars dying and crumbling away into nothing. It made Jack's heart ache just to hear it. He slipped through the crowd toward the man and boy, almost without thinking about it. Nightlight was a child in pain, and Jack was a Guardian - that was what drove him forward, to reach out even though this pain was so very, very old.

Jack touched Nightlight's shoulder, and the vision burst like a soap bubble.

* * *

It was as impossible as ever to track time in the maze, but it had to be at least another two days before Jack came to another room of colored lights. He was about to settle down and snatch some rest when a movement caught his eye. Something was already resting in the room.

Jack reached for the staff that wasn't there on instinct, ready to attack before he even got a good look at the little bundle of tattered cloth leaning against the far wall. A child.

Not just any child.

"Jamie?"

Jack's heart lifted at the sight of the boy, then dropped as Jamie lifted his head and Jack saw the expression on his face, the dark circles under his eyes, realized there was blood seeping from the tatters in Jamie's t-shirt.

"Jack!"

Jamie's cry was nearly a sob. He threw himself at Jack, nearly bowling him over with his embrace. Jack dropped down to put his arms around Jamie as the boy buried his face in Jack's chest, shaking, barely restraining himself from crying. Brave little Jamie, who had the heart of a lion - but there were things in this place that would make even a lion tremble.

Jack couldn't even tell him it was going to be okay. Not without lying. "How did you get here?" he asked instead, kneeling down so he could look Jamie in the eye.

Jamie pulled back, hollow-eyed and streaming with tears.

"We were trying to find you and the trail led here. They brought me and Cupcake to help against the nightmares."

"Where are the others?" Jack asked. "Did they tell you to wait here?"

Jamie shook his head. "We - followed you to Camelot, but the Nightmares attacked and they forced me onto the Siege, and it took me here. I waited as long as I could, but these things came and chased me -" he trembled, gripping Jack's hoodie like a lifeline. "I haven't seen the Guardians since."

Jack was so furious he could feel his heartbeat pulsing in his ears.

Why had the others brought Jamie and Cupcake? How could they risk their lives like that? He wasn't worth this. If this was the price paid for trying to rescue him, they should have left him.

"Jack -" Jamie said, in a quiet, frightened voice. "It's been days. I'm so hungry. There was water and I guess it was safe because I haven't gotten sick from it, but there hasn't been any food."

"We'll - we'll figure something out. We'll -"

But he couldn't promise that. He couldn't promise that they'd find a way out, that the Guardians would find them in time.

"They're looking for us, Jamie." That much, he could be sure of. "The Guardians are looking for us, okay? We just - we just have to hold out long enough for them to find us. There are animals here and sometimes things we could use to make a fire. I don't know if they're safe but I could try to eat first to make sure, because if something makes me sick, we'd know it could kill you. We just have to - we just have to hold out for a while, okay? Because they're looking for us. They won't leave us in here. They know where we are now and they'll get us out."

Jamie finally released Jack's hoodie, smearing tears from his face with both hands.

"Okay," he said, nodding, choking back the fear. "You're right. They wouldn't leave us like this."

The smile on Jamie's face, wavery and fragile as it was, made it easier for Jack to smile, too.

"Now all we have to do," he said, standing up, reaching a hand out to Jamie to help him up "- is to stay together -"

It was as if the maze had been waiting for him to say it. Without even a crack of warning, the floor beneath Jamie split and fell away, and so did the boy - his screaming fit to freeze Jack's heart.

"NO!"

Jack threw himself into the hole, and landed hard as the floor reformed just in time for him to crash into it. He felt his shoulder pop and yelled again, in pain as much as in horror.

He rolled over, beating the floor with both fists, oblivious to the pain in his shoulder.

"JAMIE!"

The floor stayed solid beneath him. He pounded, and screamed, and jumped, but it refused to give. When he stopped yelling and pressed his ear to the stone, he heard the faintest sounds coming through - sounds that might have been screaming.

Jack stood up and charged out of the room, hoping that he'd come to a place soon with something he could use to break through the floor - but instead, he ran straight into another vision.

"NO!" he screamed, but there was no help for it - he floated in midair, intangible, unable to even touch his feet to the floor as Nightlight and Rashena ran through what looked like a large living room, the ornate furniture pushed back and covered with sheets in an elaborate blanket fort.

Rashena's shrieks of joy only put him in mind of Jamie's scream of terror. Jack thrashed against the memory, shouting over the words Kozmotis was speaking to his second in the corner.

"Let me out! LET ME OUT! I DON'T CARE ABOUT PITCH'S STUPID PAST! I DON'T CARE!"

The maze was as unyielding as ever. The memory carried on.

Jack settled against the wall, sliding down it to sit with his knees drawn up, watching the memory play out through blurred eyes.

Nightlight and Rashena were running around the house in a manner that could only be described as "capering," clearly engaged in some game of pretend. Nightlight's role in it involved dancing in a silly way and wearing something like a colander on his head.

Kozmotis sat at the table nearby with Jem Breen. The former had a glass of wine, the latter was not so much nursing a beer as aggressively doctoring it.

"Oh, for the love of Solus, are you chronically incapable of not being fancy?" Jem said, nodding towards Kozmotis' wine, reading the bottle. "'Sterling Saint Marigold tart cherry cranberry'? Really?"

"I am a slave to my nature," said Koz, sipping from the wineglass with his pinkie extended. "And my nature has a palate."

In the background, Jack had begun sobbing. The sight of Nightlight and Rashena capering, of Jem and Koz enjoying each others' company, hadn't stopped his tears.

Jamie was lost in the maze, hurting and afraid, and Jack was stuck here watching happiness that he knew had to end somehow, and horribly. In all his years of begging the moon for answers, he'd never felt so helpless.

Kozmotis and Jem sipped their drinks as Rashena and Nightlight collapsed their blanket fort by falling onto it. Kozmotis was watching them play with an expression that was almost sad.

"You know the Star Herders apparently put a weapon in the hands of their children as young as age twelve. We didn't run into them because there were so many of us and our ships were making so much noise, but some of the creatures on their planet are incredibly dangerous. If the Star Herders went out alone, the beasts would stalk them. They teach every child to fight as soon as they're old enough to hold a weapon," said Kozmotis. "His people lived in peace but even so, their children had to grow up sooner than they'd have liked. I can't pronounce it but they have a word for it that translates to 'the great sorrow.' "

He went on, "They're playing right now but he thinks he needs to protect her, as if he's some kind of bodyguard. That's how the older teens saw themselves apparently, in regards to the younger children. They were their shepherds, the guardians of their childhoods."

"Well, he doesn't have to grow up too fast now, does he?"

"I suppose not. Nothing can make up for what he's lost but maybe that's something extra I can give him."

"Yeah? What are you planning?"

"Well, I already have the adoption papers. All that's left is to -"

Koz and Jem went on chatting, but Jack was crying too hard to hear anymore. There was no reason he needed to see this. No more reason than that he needed to be chased by tentacle monsters, but at least the maze let him run from those. How could he sit and listen to happy people mildly discussing adoption when Jamie was starving to death, if something else wasn't killing him first?

When the voices stopped, he wiped his eyes and stood, prepared to go, but Nightlight stood directly in front of him, close enough to run into.

Jack was still only a second before running. Nightlight flashed out of his way like a puff of smoke, which was fine. Jack didn't care about getting to the vision of the boy. He had to get to the real boy who'd gotten lost in the maze because of him.

* * *

Jack ran for days. Sometimes he ran from things attracted by the motion. Mostly, he just ran in search of Jamie.

He didn't even have time to skid to a stop when Nightlight stepped in front of him again. He skidded right through the boy and into another memory, as if Nightlight had been a portal he'd passed through.

"No! No, I don't care!" Jack huffed out, wringing his hands together fitfully. "I don't! Care!"

All that was going to happen was that he was going to watch a family fall apart - just like Jamie's would if he didn't get him out of the maze and they never saw him again.

Jack found himself outside on a balcony. Through the glass doors he saw people dancing in a large room.

It was a party, some kind of officers' ball taking place in a massive ballroom of Kozmotis' mansion. Officers milled around, some of them in normal formal dress, some of them in formal uniforms.

Kozmotis wasn't in the room, though. He was there on the balcony, with Lal Jelias, having a private moment that Jack seemed to have been dropped into.

"You wanted to talk to me about something?" Kozmotis asked her, looking bewildered. "If it's about your report, it was excellent. You needn't worry about the rescue operation, since Sergeant Vector was the one technically in charge, it's his responsibility to gather up the statistics on the refugees -"

"This isn't really about work," she said. There was a glint in her eye that suggested she was amused at his obliviousness.

It was obvious what he was being oblivious over. Lal had taken steps to look absolutely gorgeous. Unlike the other officers, she'd opted for a beautiful dress in deep blue with silver threads running through it like rivers, instead of her formal uniform. She'd made herself up, but Jack noticed, she hadn't taken steps to cover her scar. She wore it as brazenly as the dress.

Koz might not have figured out the reason behind the softness in her eyes but Jack did.

It made him want to vomit.

"I am _not_ watching some other poor lady make goo-goo eyes at Pitch when I could be finding Jamie. First of all, I know she's just going to end up sad or dead or both, and second of all, ew!"

He turned on his heel and tried to stomp away, but they stood before him no matter which way he turned.

"Pretty smart of you to torture me by turning this into the Pitch Dating Show," Jack muttered, crossing his arms and growling under his breath. "This is definitely something I never wanted to see."

"So, what exactly was it that you wanted to talk about?" Kozmotis asked, still nervous. "That you needed to do alone."

"No point in drawing this out longer than necessary," Lal said straightening her shoulders and standing like a woman defiant before a firing squad. "I was hoping that you might be amenable to a couple after-party drinks, Kozmotis, or - some other form of after-party."

Kozmotis didn't seem to have words for that, just a very quizzical sounding noise.

Eventually he found them. "You mean, ah, with you and Jem, yes?"

Lal couldn't quite seem to suppress a smirk. "I am reasonably sure that Trixxi would object to Jem tagging along on the plans I had in mind, though I admit I haven't consulted her on the matter. But I see I've aimed too high," she continued, waving one hand and reaching out to take one of Kozmotis'. "I'll speak more plainly: my suggested after-party is not platonic."

"Ah," he said quietly, looking at a loss for words.

"Ughhhh," Jack groaned, throwing his hands up in the air. Could they just get through this stupid memory so he could go back to finding Jamie?

"I'm not professing my undying romantic love for you or anything," Lal said, all traces of the smirk from before having disappeared from her face. There was a flash of vulnerability behind her armor of confidence. "But you're a good man, Koz, and what I know of you, I do love. I just want to see where things could go. "

Somewhat hesitantly, she reached out for his hand. "Whaddaya say?"

Koz pulled his hand out of Lal's, shaking his head.

"Lal, I'm -"

Lal's face fell. "Please don't say you're sorry. There are ways to let people down without 'I'm sorry.'"

"I am, though," Kozmotis insisted. "You are - if I wasn't your commanding officer -"

"Please don't give me that, either," she said just a little flatly. Then she added, with some amusement. "You really aren't used to having to beat the women off with a stick, are you."

Kozmotis couldn't help but laugh. "Not so much, no. I was, to word it nicely, somewhat gawky in school and then I met..."

He trailed off.

"Ahava," she finished for him, her voice much gentler.

He nodded. "I don't think that I will ever be able to let her go. I know myself well enough to say that. You are - you are a magnificent person, though. I can say that without restraint. You are one of my favorite people. You're someone that makes me wish it could be different, because you're right, the fact that I'm your commanding officer is just an excuse. There are special dispensations...love finds a way. I can't use that as a shield."

He went on, "But I - I am just not the kind of man that is capable of moving on from that kind of grief."

"Or that kind of love, I should think," she said, seeming to have come to some sort of understanding. .

He looked at her gratefully, as if glad to be understood.

She took it in stride. "Well then, sir, I...don't apologize for my impertinence. As we of the 5th regiment infantry always say: 'Difficulties be damned.' I had to give a shot."

"And I'm honored, even if I have to say no." With one last tight-lipped smile, he turned back to the party. "I should -"

"Of course."

Jack was almost surprised. "You're turning her down?" he shouted, to Koz, speaking to the mirage for the first time. "Good! She's too good for you!"

Lal took a deep breath, alone on the balcony, but that deep breath steadied her. She walked back into the ballroom with her head held high. Jack approved. "Believe me," he assured the vision. "You're better off with someone - literally anyone else."

Kozmotis, even as he relaxed back into his role as party host, looked filled with regret. Jack didn't care. He had ceased caring for quite some time now.

However, his disinterest in watching Pitch eventually ruining his own life didn't seem to extend to Nightlight and Rashena, who were playing at the fringes of the party. It seemed that Pitch hadn't had the heart to make them stay elsewhere in the house while it went on (as if children could resist parties anyway). Nightlight wore his armor, as he had every time Jack had seen him, but apparently he felt the occasion warranted some dressing up because he was had tied a festive bright blue bowtie over it. Even after everything he'd suffered, the sight of it brought the smallest of smiles to Jack's face. Rashena, on the other hand, was dressed to the nines in a fluffy purple garment that had so many frills and bows per square inch that Jack wondered how one hadn't popped off and hit someone in the eye yet from the pressure.

They kept to the edges of the party until Nightlight spotted a particularly pretty teenage girl with raven-black hair and blue skin who was somewhere around his age, perhaps a daughter of the one the soldiers. His eyes went a little wide and his mouth opened into a little "o" as he stared at her. Rashena smiled as she saw him staring and nudged him.

He looked down at her and shook his head, as if to ask, 'What?'

"Go ask her to dance. Duh," said Rashena, who was now old enough to say things like "duh" apparently.

Nightlight hesitated. Rashena nudged him again. "Go on."

At his surrogate sister's encouragement, Nightlight stepped forward, walked to the girl, and waved to get her attention away from her group of friends. He opened his mouth as if to say something then gestured to his throat to try to explain that he had trouble talking.

The girl stared at him disdainfully as he held out his hand, welcoming her to dance with him. When she made no response, he did a little twirl to show his intention, before holding out his hand again.

"Reb, I think he wants to dance with you," chirped one of her friends.

"Well, why didn't he just say so?"

"I don't think he can talk."

The girl turned up her nose. "Why would I want to dance with you? I don't even know what you are."

Some of her friends tittered but a few looked discomfited. Nightlight mostly looked bewildered at getting such a response, and then thoughtful, as if he was trying to figure out how to even react to it. Jack supposed that, while living in the loving atmosphere of the Pitchiner home, he probably hadn't run into nastiness like this that often.

"Reb, that's not very nice..." said the chirpy friend who didn't sound so chirpy anymore.

Nightlight simply waved a hand, as if to say it was perfectly fine - or no, that it was a mistake. It was very much a "No no, I wasn't talking to you" gesture. He gestured to the lamp right next to the sneering girl, as if he had meant to dance with it all along. Bowing a deep bow to the lamp, he took it in his arms and danced around the room with it, sashaying gracefully. Some of the adults did rather comedic double-takes when they saw the strange boy dancing around the room with a lamp, but the friends that had looked uncomfortable with Reb's rudeness immediately started laughing and so did the watching Rashena. After a minute or two Nightlight put the lamp back and gestured to the other girls that had been laughing at his antics, as if to say, "Any takers?"

Three of them all leapt at the chance to dance with him, while sullen Reb hung back and glared. Nightlight made a game effort to dance with them all at once.

However, when Rashena approached, he politely turned them away and immediately swept his sister up to dance with him, balancing her little feet on his and parading her around the room. Always, he seemed like a ghost, a wisp of thing that might evaporate into nothing but it was amidst Rashena's laughter that he seemed most alive.

"Barbaric, those Star Herders," Jack suddenly heard behind him. Standing there was a man in a tuxedo and top hat, his face mostly hidden by a massive handlebar mustache and gratuitous amounts of sideburns. He stood with equally frumpy-looking older soldiers, and a woman in a poofy green gown. "No sense of etiquette. You'd think he'd learn from his betters living with a man like Kozmotis, but look at him rollicking around like an animal, dancing with lamps. He should know that his behavior reflects on his guardian. How dare he embarrass the man after he took him in."

"Hey!" Jack said defensively, despite knowing the that the man wasn't real and couldn't hear him. "What's barbaric are those sideburns."

The man had looked from side to side to make sure Kozmotis hadn't overheard, but he hadn't looked behind him. If he had, he'd have seen both Lal and Jem literally holding Kozmotis back from flying at the man in a rage. When he finally calmed, they let him go, and stood calmly by as Koz stepped, equally calm, right behind Mr. Mustache. Quietly, he said, "Actually, I'm quite proud of him."

The man nearly jumped a foot in the air. Apparently, Koz had gotten some practice being creepy long before he became Pitch.

"He's come a long way since I took him in. It's a miracle that he's learned to laugh again."

Crystalline laughter drifted over the sounds of the party from where Nightlight danced with Rashena, as if on cue

The mustached man looked flabbergasted as he sputtered. "I meant - I didn't mean -"

"Of course you did," Koz cut him off, with a veneer of snide understanding. "That's what everyone thinks of the Star Herders. How tragic that, with him the last of them, no one will ever learn otherwise."

"Well, it's not entirely off base," the man half-whined. "They'd been in contact with us for how long, and they still lived in those dank holes, fighting off those dreadful monsters with whatever spear-shaped things grew out of the ground? To say they lived for their children -" he sneered. "Their children might have done well for themselves if they'd grown up in _our_ schools, learning to be modern individuals alongside our children. I don't know why they insisted on not sending them to be educated." He sniffed. "Their people might have_ survived_ if they had."

Jack's attention was on Kozmotis then. In that specific moment, he saw the darkness in Koz. He saw the coldness he was used to seeing in those eyes, rage and spite crystallizing into something solid and sharp as Koz stared the man down. He still wasn't Pitch, because this was born of compassion and love and a mind open to things the admiral couldn't even imagine, but Jack could see how Pitch could come from this man.

The thing that struck Jack was that, despite Pitch's towering evil, Kozmotis was far more terrifying. He imagined the kind of monster Pitch could have been if he cared about something this much, but still felt it was okay for him to do evil in its name instead.

The first thing that came to his mind was that he finally understood - Pitch _did_ care about something this much. He cared about Jack. He cared enough to wake up Old Man Winter, and risk the world to get to him. He cared enough to drag Jack into the maze, to be tortured for turning him down.

He cared enough to trap him in the dark - him and Jamie - for how long

The ferocious streak Jack saw in Koz suggested that it could be a long, long time.

"As you well know, there are planets in the Core Worlds where they shoved their children outside of the shelters to be taken," Koz said, in the oily tones Jack associated with Pitch's threats. " We pretend it doesn't happen, and when we can't, we nod our heads and say 'well what else could they have done?'" Kozmotis shook his head, in mock pity, "Now, the Star Herders, on the other hand - the Star Herders fought to the bitter end. In every village, in every home, every single adult died trying to protect their children. And before the fearlings, they'd hardly known war - against the natural forces of their world, certainly, but the very concept of fighting each other was all but unimaginable. Our history, you recall, was a bit more storied than that."

He turned on the man, the oily smoothness all slicked out of his tone. He finished with a snarl. "I should hope that someday we can aspire to their level of barbarism. So if you don't mind, please refrain from casting aspersions on my ward's people."

He added, calmly, "You ignorant fathead."

Behind him, Jem and Lal were both facepalming. Jack almost laughed.

The mutton-chopped man, meanwhile, had turned a truly fantastic shade of purple.

"You'll -" he sputtered. "You will regret this, _colonel_," he sneered. He whirled on his slightly elevated bootheel and pushed away through the crowd.

The other people that had been talking to Mr. Mustache harrumphed and walked away with a few mutters of "Well, I say!" and "The nerve!"

Lal stepped forward, still wincing. "You do know that was Admiral Flev's husband, right?"

Koz's mouth dropped open and then shut with a slight click, his already pale skin going paler. He breathed out a creaky, pained, "No, I did not, actually."

Jem patted him on the back, sympathetic. "Would you like to kiss your shiny promotion goodbye now, or later?

Rashena's scream interrupted what might have been a meltdown on her father's part. Jack and the three officers whirled around, zeroing in on her location. Only a moment ago, she'd been holding her locket up, proudly displaying it to a captain who was a little, it seemed, deep in his cups - now, the captain had fallen to the ground, clawing at Rashena's dress, ripping bows from it as she wriggled away. The man's eyes rolled in his head as he pulled the little girl to him, lurching as if using his body for the first time. He reached for her throat. She twisted away but shadows formed around one of his hands into nasty-looking claws, well long enough to slice the little girl open.

The soldiers in dress uniforms were drawing their weapons. Eyes wide with terror, Kozmotis himself was rushing over as if he planned to kill the man with his bare hands.

But none of them reacted faster than Nightlight. He dashed for his spear like a beam of starlight, then vaulted himself at the man, kicking him soundly in the chest with both feet.

Shadows sprang out of the man's mouth and eyes and ears as Nightlight brought the spear down and stabbed him in the chest. For a moment, the light at the tip flashed so bright that it was nearly blinding, suspending every figure in the room in starlight. Inhuman screams filled the air as the shadows suffered under the onslaught of light.

The boy leapt back. In a room of trained soldiers, Nightlight, first and best, kept himself between Rashena and the room, his knuckles white around his spear.

The downed man moved. The circle around him jumped back, then jumped back farther as the corpse wriggled in such a way that no healthy human moved. Long, shadowy masses snaked under his skin and poured into the air, massing above the dead man.

But they had been weakened by the light of Nightlight's spear and without a living body to latch onto they dissolved away into nothingness.

The man no longer moved.

Mass chaos erupted. Amidst the screeching, Jack caught words. "-Fearlings -" "Who ever knew -" "- bypassed all the wards -" "- they can possess us now?"

Kozmotis had no ears for the discussion. He fell on his children, scooping the crying Rashena up in one arm and throwing the other around Nightlight. Nightlight, who hadn't moved from his defensive position over Rashena, his eyes huge, his teeth gritted, trembled in place as if frozen there despite Koz's one-armed hug around him.

Slowly, the trembling took over Nightlight's body, and he dropped his spear. It clattered on the floor as he sagged into Koz's arms, his other going around Rashena, as if their contact was a tether drawing him back from the last time he'd held his spear in defense of a child.

"It's all right," Kozmotis soothed, as Nightlight's tinkling starlike weeping joined Rashena's, as the bodyguard became a young boy again in his arms. "Ssssh, you're both safe. You're safe now."

The memory fell away, leaving only Nightlight, on his knees as if still hugging an invisible man and child.

He stood, his face still streaked with tears, but his eyes were no longer wild. He hefted his spear and tilted his head at Jack, as if awaiting questions.

Jack just looked at him impassively. "So can I go now?"

Up ahead of them, Jamie screamed.

Jack charged ahead, Nightlight vanishing around the corner in front of him. A blooming field of bone-white flowers dipped on their stems to drink from a stream of blood, flowing from a small pile of meat and polyester being savaged by a hairless, Labrador-sized thing with a spine of bone spikes.

Jack had never killed anything with his bare hands before, but there was a first time for everything.

When the savaging creature was dead, and Jack's hands were bleeding, he fell on the shredded windbreaker and spilling down vest, but no one would have called what was left with the blood-soaked fabric and feathers a body.

He screamed so loud, so long, the whole maze had to hear him. And when he was done, for good measure, he did it again.

His roar refined into words.

"IT'S - NOT - REAL!"

It was not real. It was not real. He feared this so much. He feared this, maybe more than he feared never leaving the maze himself. That was what the maze did. Made you face your fears - not the reasonable ones that, in facing, you became stronger for overcoming, but the ones that you never considered, because there was no overcoming them. There was no good to be had from thinking them over - and over - until they consumed you.

They were just horrible. And possible. And you didn't think about them, because thinking about them too much would suck the life out of living.

Jamie couldn't really have fallen on the Siege and died in this place.

The maze just had to know that this was a horror Jack would never forget. No matter how much he tried.

"You - think I'd just believe this," Jack screamed, tears streaming down his face as he stood as if to face the maze around him. "I don't! I'm not broken!"

He stopped talking, just for a moment, to sob violently into his hands. But when the moment had passed, he stood up, and though his eyes were still wet, the stream of tears had stopped. That meant, of course, that there was nothing there to wash away the blood smeared on his face.

"I'm not even breaking!" he shouted. "This isn't real! This isn't real. This isn't real…"

He said it to himself again and again as he walked away, hands still soaked in blood, until he'd said it so much that the words lost their meaning.

* * *

After ages of wandering in and out of shadows, Jack wandered into another memory. He stood silently, waiting for it to be over.

"According to the general's report, every civilian was successfully evacuated with minimal casualties to your unit," said a woman wearing a very fancy-looking uniform with quite a few bars on her chest. She was older than Koz, with dark skin and golden dreadlocks pulled back into a ponytail. She sat there at her desk, looking over a report, while Kozmotis stood at attention in front of her.

"Yes, ma'am. We only lost five soldiers at the moonlight refinery and power plant. The reactor was going critical. We managed to get our engineers in place to prevent a meltdown, but there was an explosion in one of the control rooms. We retook the power plant only just in time."

"Considering the circumstance - and the minimal time it took for things to be brought under control - the loss is unfortunate but most likely could not have been avoided. To suffer no other casualties among the refugees or our men and women… well, that is really quite extraordinary leadership, Colonel Pitchiner."

"What's most extraordinary is the discipline and skill of my unit, ma'am. They're all fine soldiers and I'm proud to lead them."

"Modest, as well - though don't think I can't see that pride burning behind your eyes Pitchiner. You trained them after all. I know your type." She kept scanning over the reports. "You've climbed the command structure faster than most and no one does that without intent. I suppose you're aiming for general now."

She put the report down. Kozmotis looked more nervous as he stood.

"Of course, promotions are not without their politics. Even a stellar record doesn't guarantee you one. There is the matter of personal judgement on the part of the admirals."

Pitch finally spoke up, "Ma'am, if this is about the party -"

"Save it," Admiral Flev said sharply.

"My apologies, ma'am."

"Your apologies indeed. My husband said you never did apologize to him for your remarks. I suppose the unfortunate incident with Captain Kallus prevented that, but would you now?"

Kozmotis stood silent for a moment, working his jaw. Finally he took a deep breath and said, "No, I would not, ma'am. He insulted my ward's people and essentially called him a barbarian - and he did it under my roof. If standing up for a child in one's care, and for a people that can no longer speak up for themselves, is something to be punished, then I will suffer it gladly."

"Indeed you would," the admiral said she cracked the smallest inkling of a smile "_If_ I didn't know that my husband can be a tremendous blowhard. I love the man - he's far more generous in his actions than he is in his words - but some of his beliefs are so antiquated they could be appraised by a museum curator. There was no call for what he said and he and I have had a little talk. Do expect a written apology arriving in the mail sometime soon - to you _and_ your ward, if you're inclined to share it with him. Although you should expect your formal notice of promotion to arrive much sooner."

"Ma'am?" Kozmotis said, his voice cracking just slightly in bewilderment.

"Only five men lost in a campaign that size, every civilian accounted for, and you're uncompromising enough in your integrity to stand before admiral and be utterly unapologetic for defending a child in your care? If that's not leadership material, I don't know what is. We're going to need men like you in high places, especially now that the fearlings are developing new abilities."

"Thank you, Admiral Flev," said a still bewildered Kozmotis. "I will endeavor to exceed the expectations of and you and the other admirals."

"Let's just hope that your leadership skills continue to outshine your skills at diplomacy, General Pitchiner."

"Yes, ma'am," said Kozmotis somewhat breathlessly, his voice going a bit more wry. "That is indeed the hope."

The memories shifted suddenly around him. Kozmotis sat in his home, reading some sort of tablet. Rashena and Nightlight were on the floor beside his chair with a board game spread between them. Rashena appeared to be winning.

Nightlight claimed a piece, however, and laughed a short burst of triumph. Koz looked up from his technology, nodding with a smile as Rashena yielded one of her pieces. Nightlight leaned against the arm of the chair. Absently, Koz rested his fingers on Nightlight's hair, petting him lightly as he read.

The children played, and Kozmotis read for a moment longer before he seemed to consider what he was doing. His fingers paused in Nightlight's hair as he looked at the children, who played happily on.

"He acted like her bodyguard at first," said Koz's voice, as if in a voiceover. The image of the family became smudged as another memory bled into it. Shadows of Jem and Koz walked through the memory, wavering in and out of clear view, the interior of one of their ships just discernible as they walked through it and the memory of the living room. "But I don't want to think of one child as bodyguard to another. I don't want him to think of himself as anything but her brother. As my son."

"So when do you get the adoption papers?" Jem asked.

Both spectral memories gusted away like puffs of smoke, leaving Kozmotis still walking, down the long hall, to the door - the towering door with the countless intricate locks, to the guard post Jack had seen him take in that first memory.

The whispers waited until the silence was so heavy that their sound was almost a relief to hear.

_**"Ahava."**_

Koz gritted his teeth, sucking in his breath. There was sweat on his brow, and the lines around his eyes had deepened since he first took up his post.

It seemed to have been many years since he first stood at the door. Many years - or a few short, horrible ones

"You have no power here," he hissed, but there was an uneven quality to his voice. "Using her to hurt me won't change that."

_**"she still cries for you to come save her," **_the whispers hissed. There was a tone to their whispers similar to the satisfied moans of a hungry person biting into the first food they'd seen all day._** "she begs you to come rescue her from her agony."**_

Something inside the prison banged, hard, against the door.

"Kozmotis!"

Ahava's voice poured through unseen cracks in the doors dissolving into pained weeping at the end.

Koz kicked the door. "Settle down in there," he growled, gritting his teeth, anger wrinkling his brow to a severity Jack had only seen when the possessed captain had tried to kill Rashena.

"Kozmotis, my love," Ahava sobbed. The thuds against the door grew softer, like a woman letting her palms land against them. There was a scraping sound of a body sliding down the door. "Are you there? Please say you're there -"

"I said stop it!"

And suddenly Pitch - no, he was Kozmotis still - was kicking the door, and hammering it with his fists, his teeth clenched so tight that it seemed he would crack them.

The hall rang with the echoes of his assault on the door when he stopped, breathing heavily, the whispers and the weeping silenced.

The weeping came, slowly, back.

"I'm sorry," Ahava cried, as if Kozmotis had struck her, and not the door. "I'm sorry - I know - you can't trust -" she broke off into more quiet cries. "Please, this once. Trust me, my love. Let me out. They tear me apart again and again in here. Please let me out -"

"You're not real," Kozmotis said, softly, sadness in his voice. "You're dead. I held your body. I pushed the button that sent your casket into the quasar -"

"I'm not my body," Ahava said, plaintive, soft. "Please. Let me go -"

"Just shut up," Kozmotis whispered, a hiss that cut through the whispers. "Just - for today, won't you shut up? Just once -"

There was silence behind the door, but not too much, before Ahava's voice came back. "There's nothing I can say to convince you," she mused, sadly. "You're too - too you for that. Even if you believed me, you'd never open the door."

"The risk would be too great," Kozmotis agreed.

"You'll stand guard forever, with this door always between us."

"I would," Koz confirmed, the lines in his face deepening.

"You'd leave me here in the dark, with them, forever."

The horror of that settled on him, visibly like a weight. Kozmotis slouched beneath it.

"You'd listen to them rip my soul apart, and you'd guard them while they did it."

Kozmotis closed his eyes, and tears ran through the deep creases around his eyes, the frown-lines digging deep around his mouth.

"Nothing you say," he whispered, "will make me open these doors."

Ahava didn't weep anymore - didn't say anything for a moment, as the whispers hissed softly - as if gathering - behind the door.

"At least touch me once, before they tear me apart," she asked. "Please. Don't let me go without any comfort -"

Black fingers extended under the door - but they were the black of a night sky full of stars, and the silver nails were chipped, ragged and bleeding.

Kozmotis' mouth opened in a silent scream as the fingers groped for his.

Eyes wide, he reached down, slowly, to touch them.

And suddenly, they were gone. They could never have been there. There was no crack between the floor and the lower edge of the towering doors, no seam even for a woman's slim fingers to snake under.

He stood again, at attention, eyes shut tight to keep the brimming tears from falling, taking deep breaths to calm himself.

"You could have stopped taking guard duty, but you couldn't let them know it was affecting you," Jack said, his voice flat with growing hatred and disdain. "That's why all this is going to come apart at the seams."

He hadn't gone without learning a few things from Anansi about stories and one of the primary lessons he'd learned was how dangerous pride was and how it always led to a fall.

"You were too proud to tell anyone the great General Pitchiner couldn't hack it, after putting so many of them away."

Pitchiner stood there shaking and Jack had trouble feeling pity for him. A part of him did. A part of him always would feel compassion for others, even through rage and pain, but right now the rage and pain was so strong that the part of him that was kind had been reduced to a whisper.

"And because you couldn't walk away, because you couldn't let people know you couldn't do it, that's why Jamie -" He swallowed thickly. "That's why Jamie might be dead, if all that was real. It's why I'm here. It's why there's a Pitch Black, isn't it."

He smiled a smile that was almost deranged.

"When I get out of here, I'm going to tell everyone. I'm going to tell them all your secrets. I'm going to tell them all your fears. I'm going to tell them all about Kozmotis Pitchiner, the weak link that let fear get into _my world._ Maybe someday Pitch will even be you again so that it actually hurts."

Kozmotis said nothing, of course - just stood, proud as ever, as the whispers started up again.


End file.
